DENSO Team Design Center ready to open

The Impact, Fall 2003

Phase I and Phase II of the DENSO Team Design Center stands ready on the first floor of the Engineering Building for students to work on group design, analysis, and presentation of engineering projects related to the automotive industry. The Center, made possible by a three-year $150,000 gift from DENSO North America Foundation, will be used by hundreds of students, including all freshman engineering students, by late fall. It is designed to effectively support the project-oriented education model for which UDM is recognized and the teamwork environment so prevalent in industry today.

The Center is scheduled to evolve through three phases over a three-year period. The first phase, recently completed, includes five team work areas each equipped with computers with AutoCAD - Release 14 software to support design efforts, a conference table, whiteboard and tackboard.

The second phase upgraded and expanded the design and central computing facility, including student access to UNIX workstations with up-to-date software for computational fluid dynamics modeling, finite element modeling, mathematics and other functions. This phase included the installation of 14 new Sun workstations. The third phase will create a distributed work environment by installing UNIX workstations, with appropriate software, in each of the center’s five work areas and networking them to the Ford FACT Center, UDM Engineering and Science’s central UNIX lab. This will allow the engineering students to use the advanced computing systems to apply and analyze data received in the central computing classroom.

Group-oriented projects may involve such systems and processes as climate control, structural analysis, suspension control or vehicle dynamics.

According to John Camp ’63, ’67, DENSO senior vice president, “The Center developed by UDM is an excellent application of DENSO’s contribution to UDM and DENSO is proud to be a part of this project. The UDM team has done an excellent job. Personally, being an alumnus of UDM, I am especially happy to be a part of such a successful project.”

The Center is DENSO’s second contribution to UDM in recent years. In 2001, DENSO International America, North American headquarters to Japan-based DENSO Corporation, presented UDM with a $30,000 gift that was used toward renovating a seminar-style classroom in the Engineering Building.

DENSO, a leading supplier of advanced automotive technology systems and components for the world’s major car makers, operates in 30 countries with 87,000 associates.