Two years in planning, the April meeting featured a tour of Chrysler's technical center, one of the world's most technologically advanced motor vehicle design facilities. Chrysler has organized its design center by "platform" or type of vehicle, giving engineers complete access to technical data and to each other to facilitate planning and development of vehicles. All aspects of product development from concept to initial manufacturing take place at the 504-acre site 30 miles north of Detroit.
Attendees first visited the center's computer facilities, which house several IBM mainframes and SP-2 computers, two Cray supercomputers, and numerous Silicon Graphics servers to provide employees with free exchange of design data. The technical computer operations center, one floor below the mainframe room, serves as the control point for all servers as well as the technical help desk service, which provides employees and suppliers with telephone consultants to answer any question about the computer systems.
In Competitive Product Analysis, actual vehicles from other manufacturers are meticulously disassembled, parts catalogued and analyzed, photographs taken, and data entered into a computer database so that designers and engineers can compare other cars to Chrysler's products and to see how other manufacturers are solving some of the problems in common to the auto industry. Each part's data and photograph are available throughout the center on the company's intranet, and parts can be checked out for physical examination if needed.
The Noise, Mechanical Vibration and Harshness lab subjects cars and assemblies to various types of physical vibration to test their performance under different conditions. There are dynamometers for running cars at various speeds indoors, modal analysis for determining resonant frequencies, and sound analysis, both to determine performance in a quiet-room environment as well as by exposing a vehicle to high levels of sound to measure sound transmission and turn up potential problems.
Cars and parts are bombarded with RF at fields up to 200 volts per meter in the Electromagnetic Compatibility Lab. Three shielded rooms test vehicles' electrical and computer systems for the effects of RF at frequencies in fields at 60 Hz and continuously from 20 kHz to 18 GHz. Data is collected and transmitted from the room via optical fiber to avoid interference with or from the RF field. They can also measure RF radiated from a vehicle's electronics. The room is so RF-tight that members carrying cellular telephones noted that they indicated out-of-range while in the room.
The tour concluded with a visit to the new teleproduction facility located in the Amphitheatre, where Chrysler has provided extensive facilities to allow television broadcast stations to originate news coverage.