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SATL/HATY student member, doctoral candidate Subhadyuti Sahoo from Aalto University participated to the FISITA World Mobility Summit 2022 Student Opportunities Programme. He wrote down his experiences about the Summit.
FISITA World Mobility Summit 2022 was held in Paris, France on 17th October 2022. FISITA World Mobility Summit is generally an annual conference which brings together technical executives from FISITA Corporate members and international expert leaders, technology strategists, academics and public-policy makers. AVL was the Gold sponsor and Ansys was the Silver sponsor for this summit.
During the summit, knowledge was shared between speakers and delegates through presentations and roundtable panel discussions so that everyone could walk away with fresh perspectives and strategies to support their continued progress on their individual business needs. Attending this summit, amongst others, were Phillippe Jacquin (from Michelin), Sophie Schmidtlin (from Renault Group), Erik Schuenemann (from Bosch), Laurence Montanari (from Dassault Systèmes), Christophe Bianchi (from Ansys) and Moran Price (from IRP Systems).
The event started with a keynote from Nadine LeClair, FISITA President and Expert Fellow at Groupe Renault, followed by presentations, talks and discussions by technical experts at various automobile companies. The entire event was divided into two halves: one on each side of the lunch. Presentations from Phillippe Jacquin, Sophie Schmidtlin and Erik Schuenemann before the lunch break was followed by equally enthusiastic presentations from Laurence Montanari, Christophe Bianchi and Moran Price on the other side of the lunch. During her keynote speech, Nadine LeClair stressed, more than once, on the collaboration between research and business in vehicular industries.
“It [the collaboration] is paramount to reduction of CO2 in the world,” said she.
Phillippe Jacquin, Vice President B2C Tyre Development at Michelin, talked about “Life Cycle Analysis” of present-day vehicles. According to him, tremendous challenges lie ahead as players in the electrical and hybrid mobility spectra come together and join forces for their common goal towards global carbon-neutrality.
“Right now, vehicle tyres contribute nearly 20 % towards a vehicle’s energy efficiency. We, at Michelin, are aiming to increase this efficiency. Life cycle analysis lies at the heart of these operations,” said he.
Sophie Schmidtlin, CTO Circular Economy Business, gave a talk on “Circular Economy” in automobile industry. She shared with delegates at the summit Renault Group’s vision for future: to use recyclable materials from old cars to build new cars. To that end, Renault Group is developing a concept called RE-FACTORY – the first European factory dedicated to the circular economy of mobility – which consists of 4 keychains:
- Re-trofit: developed for extending the life of vehicles
- Re-energy: which provides solutions for the production, storage and management of green energies
- Re-cycle: to optimize material resource efficiency, and
- Re-start: which promotes innovation and knowledge-sharing.
“The future is neutral frontrunning,” said she, “but it has its own challenges.”
Erik Schuenemann is the Director for System Engineering Powertrain at Bosch. His presentation was more focused on “Hydrogen Engine Powertrains” which he firmly believes to be the “attractive solution for future mobility”. Bosch is currently working on building powertrain components and software solutions to bring about full functionality of H2 engines. It plans to use such H2 engines in light-duty hybrid powertrains. E. Schuenemann believes that H2 engines can contribute towards cost-effective solutions for automotive mobility as such engines can be manufactured with recycled components from a traditional fossil fuel engine – such an ecosystem can provide attractive employment opportunities and do not require fully-equipped or fully-functional H2 fueling stations.
“Fuel cells are good but H2 engines also need to be taken into account because they have to co-exist,” he declared.
After the lunch, Laurence Montanari, Vice-President Transportation and Mobility at Dassault Systèmes, spoke on “Sustainable Innovation Transportation & Mobility”. She stressed that it is essential to understand which factor(s) is/are important to de-carbonization as numbers in one region may not be representative of numbers in other regions. As an example, she cited the cases of India and EU nations. As comparison of simulated results with real-world data is now possible, thanks to improved computational power, she highlighted that the solutions which work in countries like India may not mean much for the solutions in EU nations and hence, a few tweaks here and there will have to be factored in.
“Accelerating the energy transition could be possible in 3 ways – decarbonization of vehicles, increase in mileage of vehicles running on electric energy and maximizing the number of passengers sharing a commercial vehicle,” said she.
Up next was Christophe Bianchi, Chief Technologist at Ansys. His talk was on “Modelling & Simulation for Sustainability across the Automotive Life Cycle”. Ansys is developing an ecosystem in which it is targeting to limit carbon footprint throughout the entire supply chain process. C. Bianchi believes that such a step does result in quantified business impacts which he shows through his company’s case studies on CO2 emission (50% reduction in the emission) and energy consumption (64% reduction in consumption). Simulations also help in reducing prototyping – all the real-life scenarios need not be played out through prototypes but can be simulated through relevant software. He also does not forget to mention the usefulness of machine learning and artificial intelligence in vehicle simulation.
“Machine learning can help in simulation of a number of factors which are generally based on thousands of parameters – what the results could be and which factors can never be taken out of consideration [for real-life scenarios],” said he.
Moran Price, co-founder and CEO at IRP Systems, gave her talk on “The Fast Lane Towards Zero-Emission Urban Mobility”. According to her, urban mobility is the main driving force towards electrification of most of the vehicles. However, its requirements are diverse and challenging as no one-fits-all solution exists for commercial vehicles. It may so happen that one powertrain solution may not even work the same way for 2 different types of vehicles – cars and trucks, for example. Thus, she highlighted that, acceleration towards zero-emission depends much on the affordable and accessible solutions for each type of vehicles.
“When we started building electric powertrain for two-wheelers [taking inspirations from powertrains used for commercial and passenger cars], we came to realize that safety and performance features are paramount to controlling harmful emissions,” she stressed.
Key Takeaways
I was one of the doctoral candidates, apart from another person from University of Birmingham in the UK, who got the golden opportunity to attend FISITA World Mobility Summit 2022 as a part of its Student Opportunities Programme, which allows students from different universities to visit such summits and get to interact with the crème de la crème of the automotive industry. Such a much-needed opportunity has opened new perspectives for me on devising energy management strategies and on how to make off-road vehicles even more carbon-neutral. The three main takeaways from the summit for me would be (in no particular order):
- opportunity to gain first-hand experience of how summits actually look like,
- opportunity to gain newer perspectives on my current research, and
- opportunity to build connections with people from automotive industry, especially with those whose work align with my doctoral research.