FOX Carolina 21Dept. of Energy to give CU-ICAR $1M grant

Clemson University's president James Barker announced Monday that the school's automotive energy program would receive $1 million from the US Department of Energy.

The grant is to be used to create a research and education center for sustainable vehicle systems.

University officials made the announcement at the Automotive Transatlantic Summit at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR).

The center's aim is to promote the development of an engineering workforce for the next generation of automotive technologies.

The university said that the center is part of the energy department's Graduate Automotive Technology Education, or GATE division, and will be headquartered at CU-ICAR. It will be one of seven centers nationwide.

"The program is designed to help our students learn to address fundamental issues of sustainability, such as vehicle lifecycle, energy use and emissions, reliability, manufacturing and cost of ownership," said Imtiaz Haque, chairman of Clemson's automotive engineering department.

"Future automotive products and technologies will have to meet a wide variety of goals — economic and environmental, as well as performance goals — in order to meet market requirements," Haque said. "The GATE Center of Excellence in Sustainable Vehicle Systems will help our students gain the strength in innovation that is the key to our automotive industry remaining competitive in world markets."

Clemson's automotive engineering program has grown, with 135 students enrolled in the automotive engineering graduate program this fall.

"When we were designing this program, we thought if we had 50 students, that'd be great," Haque said. "Just two years into the master's program, we had 76  students and more knocking on the doors. Since then we graduated the nation's first Ph.D. student in automotive engineering, and interest in the program continues to expand. Our growth reminds us of how vital the automotive industry truly is. There is more innovation going on in this industry right now than there has ever been before."

The Department of Energy GATE Centers of Excellence focus on three critical areas of automotive technology: hybrid propulsion, energy storage and lightweight materials.

The 5-year GATE program funds curriculum development and expansion, and laboratory work.

The program's goal is to promote "the development of an engineering workforce that will overcome technical barriers and help commercialize the next generation of advanced automotive technologies."

"Cars today are very, very complex," Haque said. "They have lots of disciplines interfacing. It's no longer possible to be just a mechanical engineer or electrical engineer or computer scientist; you have to be all of those. We have to produce a workforce that can develop these vehicles for the future."

Other centers will be established at the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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