Australian car industry with a bright Sparke

Protect life not metal
Minimising injuries from collisions
The ‘societal harm’ concept
The life-saving differences of the VT Commodore
Role of computer simulation
Frontal crashes
Females may slide under a conventional seat belt
Australian government grant
Different Australian requirements
Early interest in engineering
The most formative years
Starting from scratch on Government standards
Rapid development with new computers
Leaping from past to future in design technology
The future: virtual-reality design process
Automotive industry geared for change / “They are people who look like you and me … except their lives have been catastrophically changed.”
Laurie Sparke, manager of Holden’s Advanced Engineering division, is talking thoughtfully about the head-injured survivors of motor vehicle accidents and the reason why he is exploring, with a passion, the relatively new field of biomechanics.

Incorporating human frailty into car design

“Traditional automotive engineering has been well defined for many years. We know the properties of steel and the fatigue-life of vehicle structures - but what about, for example, the bone strength of a person driving the car? For an engineer it’s a whole new field because there are so many different variables - age, sex, size and fragility to start with.”
Laurie Sparke’s interest in the subject arises only partly from the trend among car designers to move the design emphasis from protecting the car, to protecting its occupants.
Twelve years ago Laurie’s wife Jan, a haematologist, made a career change and joined Headway Victoria, a support organisation for people with brain injury resulting from vehicle accidents. Laurie, one of the leading car designers in the country and a member of General Motors’ elite international technology committee, was persuaded to sit on Headway’s management committee.
“It had a profound impact on me and I soon realised road fatalities were no longer the main safety issue. Because more people are actually surviving car crashes, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people with irreversible brain injury, so clearly we now need to be going the next step and trying to minimise injury, especially to the brain and neck.”
Laurie’s experience with brain-injured accident victims and their heart-rending stories of chronic pain, collapsed careers, ruined relationships and suicide, changed his life and his professional direction. He began exploring the concept of ‘Societal Harm’ – a metric for quantifying injury costs from road trauma, and which can also be used to evaluate the relationship between vehicle design and occupant protection. The Societal Harm concept arose in the United States in the 1980s to encourage a broader vehicle design perspective than that being implemented solely to reduce fatalities.
Leading the world in safety innovation
Laurie grasped the fledgling science with both hands, determined to make a life-saving difference to the millions of Australians who drive cars. The result, after 10 years of exhaustive research and development is today manifested in the new Australian-made VT Commodore, which leads the world in three key safety innovations – ‘optimisation of crash pulse’ through frontal structure design, ‘restraint system optimisation’, and side-impact airbags.
It is the shape of the ‘crash pulse’ – the deceleration-time signature of the passenger compartment during a collision when the impacting area is collapsing and decelerating the as yet undeformed part of the vehicle – which determines the severity of the load applied to the restraint systemand ultimately the injury risk to occupants.
“Understanding the relationship between the crash pulse and the biomechanics of collision injury gives us the clues to improvingoccupant protection,” he says.
“Modern methods of computer simulation of the occupant kinematics and of the behaviour of the crushing structure, combined with experimental tests, make it possible to examine and optimise the best way to reduce injury risk.”
Laurie explains that the crash pulse has to be optimised to balance three conflicting requirements – a soft front structure and minimum deceleration and occupant loading by the restraint system for the most frequent injury-causing suburban crashes, a stiffer structure for efficient energy management and moderate loads in more severe highway crashes, and a very stiff front structure with high-energy absorption capacity for high speed crashes.
In frontal crashes, two separate parts of the structure perform different functions. First is the pulse-creating crush zone that absorbs the crash energy, then the protective, rigid passenger cell that supports the loads generated, and finally there is the restraint system which must be optimised for the broadest spectrum of passenger protection needs.
The restraint system optimisation that Laurie’s team has developed for the Commodore incorporates various seatbelt retention and webbing characteristics, innovative airbag and inflator characteristics, and modifications to seat stiffness and ‘anti-submarine’ structures. Females and adolescents, because of their smaller physique, are at risk of sliding beneath a conventional seat belt, known as submarining. Structures in the front and rear seats, in combination with the seat belt design, provide increased protection to smaller occupants.
“Basically, the complete vehicle, with its structure, its restraint system and its occupants must be developed as a total system. The front structure must be designed to absorb crash energy efficiently and the passenger compartment must support the crash loads generated.”

Focusing on side impact crashes

Laurie Sparke’s work has been recognised by the Australian Government which has provided a grant for further research into reducing injuries cause by side-impact accidents.
Laurie says a side impact sled test technique has been developed to duplicate the side impact crash pulse, which is very different to a frontal crash. New computer modeling techniques will be required to simulate the special side-impact dummies Holden uses. The male BioSID dummy, and the small female SID IIs dummy are the only ones of their type in Australia. Most other manufacturers use a simpler dummy which can’t evaluate head and neck injury risk.
Side protection in Australian cars needs to be quite different to that being developed for American and European vehicles, where the focus is on chest protection. In Australia, the majority of serious and fatal injuries are to the head and neck.
This work, which will have a profound impact on many people’s lives, is typical of the enthusiasm for new horizons and new challenges that has fueled Laurie Sparke’s career and absolute passion for cars: “I’ve been in love with cars ever since my father bought me a horse that threw me into a fence …”
Laurie was raised in the small Victorian town of Thornton, where his father raised sheep, pigs and cattle to supply his butcher shop. From an early age it was clear Laurie wasn’t going to follow in his father’s steps, devoting every spare minute to dismantling clocks and constructing ambitious Meccano projects.

Design of cars a lifelong dream

“And even then I was dreaming of designing cars … I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”
In 1964 Laurie graduated from RMIT which had the only automotive school, and he went straight to Holden. But the most formative experience was a two-year post-graduate scholarship to the General Motors University in Flint, Michigan.
“Here was this country boy going on an airplane for the first time, to the other side of the world, and not only discovering it was a big place, but finding everything I’d previously taken for granted now being challenged by new perspectives. And the wealth of knowledge in the General Motors R&D activity was astounding.”
“No matter what the subject, there were world experts there, designing and developing everything from lunar vehicles to gas turbine engines, to high-tech crash-test dummies and heart-lung machines.”
“I still travel frequently to General Motors in the US and just spending time with these people is stimulating. It’s all about breaking boundaries and extending horizons.”
On his return to Australia in 1969 Laurie Sparke was given the task of meeting the Federal Government’s new crash performance standards for cars. One of the difficulties in coming up with an engineering and design solution to a concept being driven by changing consumer demands, was there was no published information on crash behaviour and no test equipment … only crashed cars to study: “It shocked me to suddenly recognise that as an engineer I had to start from scratch.”

Computers revolutionised engineering

Progress was slow; one of the drawbacks being a lack of computing power. To subject his ideas to computer analysis he either had to use the company’s mainframe at night when it wasn’t being used to run the company, or send the data to the US.
By his own admission he says he was unable to affect any radical changes to vehicle design until 10 years ago when, after a great deal of lobbying, he finally convinced Holden to invest in a $30,000 personal computer – a 386, which with its two megabytes of RAM was the most advanced PC available.
It now stands forlornly in his office as a momento to a bygone era … rescued from his young design engineers who were going to throw the obsolete machine on the scrapheap. But, like Laurie Sparke’s association with the Headway group, the old computer is an important marker in his life.
“This PC was the breakthrough. It took us from the past to the future; from the way we used to do things to the way we are going to do things.”
“There are three phases to the computer’s influence on our engineering: The first phase was it enabled us to do what we were doing, faster and more accurately. The second phase, which is the present, is being able to do things differently. The third phase will be a shift from number crunching to being able to visualise a concept on screen and then make the engineering judgement.”
Laurie says that first PC and the powerful desktop computers now in use have revolutionised the design process. “Traditionally we designed a component and then analysed the design to see if it was adequate. Now we are turning that around.”
“We can use the computer to visualise the environment in which the design has to exist. Say we want to significantly reduce the drag coefficient of the front of the car. We can use the computer to visualise how the engineer ‘feels’ it needs to look, then work on the engineering solution that will make the intuition the reality.”
“Leonardo da Vinci said ‘seeing is knowing’ and that’s what computers give us – the capacity to see our concepts before we start work on them.”
“My vision … my great ambition, is to develop a completely virtual-reality design process. We conceptualise the car on the computer, aggressively undertake a detailed design and then test and evaluate everything from the manufacturing process to the car’s performance characteristics. There will be no need for prototypes or long and expensive trials. The first car built will go to a customer.”
“We are already down that track so it will happen.”
Laurie Sparke says the car industry is at the dawn of an exciting new era. “There are challenges to be met on safety, fuel economy, the environment and recyclability. How do we manufacture, for example, for ecological sustainability? These are the engineering challenges we face.”
He says the basic components that have been the mainstay of motor vehicle design, construction and automation for the past 60 or 70 years are soon to change, and the changes will be radical.
“Over the next 10 years steel is going to be replaced by a mix of aluminium, magnesium and plastic. The weight of a typical sedan will come down dramatically, greatly reducing the energy needed to achieve adequate performance.
That Australia can be a technological leader in the car industry, Laurie Sparke is unequivocal: “Holden is the smallest viable car maker in the world, yet with the VT Commodore we were able to implement a number of leading technologies.”
“But it shouldn’t be surprising. Australians have always had a great capacity for ingenuity and innovation, it’s a part of our survival process from being isolated.”
Despite his pride in the advances and success he has helped Holden achieve, Laurie Sparke does have one small confession … a life-long love affair with the Ferrari.
“It epitomises the absolute best in engineering … the simplest, most elegant design for the highest performance. And I’ve got an old one in my garage.”

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