A Message From Our President

SAWE is an International Society and currently there is an international health crises worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic. First and foremost our concern is for health and safety of our families and loved ones. Although we’re a technical society, nothing is more important to our society than your fundamental health and wellness.

The health crisis worldwide has the attention of all of us. SAWE’s mission to provide you with training, resources, technical references, standards guidance, and other technical support remains our primary focus. However, this mission will definitely be impacted in these difficult times. We are a society that relies on the dedicated service of volunteers and a few paid positions. That doesn’t change, but we certainly expect the health and safety of our membership to come first. And we respect and understand policies of our membership’s employers regarding travel restrictions to be in the best interest of all involved. We acknowledge and honor these preventive restrictions and accept them wholeheartedly.

I have created a COVID-19 task force to gather information, provide guidance, and modify this year’s activities to best provide SAWE’s mission to our membership and the mass properties community. This is a fluid situation that relies on your understanding. The task force will create some contingencies that address these trying times.

Our society’s strength has a long history of precious personal relationships and close interaction. I expect that to become stronger in these trying circumstances, but it will rely more heavily on our online connections due to health concerns. SAWE remains dedicated to serving you for your technical needs. And we’ll be exploiting flexibility with digital and online capabilities to maintain the best quality support we can within current health constraints.


Good health to all.
John Hargrave
President SAWE

The SAWE 79th Conference on Mass Properties Engineering is now on Social Media!

The 2020 conference now has it’s own social media channels on Facebook and Instagram: sawe_conference_2020

Many thanks to Laura Bethge-Meyer from the Central European Chapter for taking the initiative to create these new social media feeds specifically for the upcoming conference in Hamburg!

Go follow on Instagram and “like” on Facebook: sawe_conference_2020

Texas Chapter needs volunteers for SAE Aero Design West, April 4-5, 2020

The Texas Chapter will be supporting the SAE Aero Design West competition again this year by weighing each competitor’s airplane and payload during the event.  See the Texas Chapter website for more details.

https://www.sae.org/attend/student-events/sae-aero-design-west/

79th SAWE International Conference on Mass Properties Engineering – Announcement is online

Just a quick note to inform you that the conference announcement is now available for download and review on the conference webpage: https://www.sawe.org/conferences/intl20

Start making your plans for Hamburg, Germany!

SAWE Group Office Update

Howdy,

For active users of Group Office, you will notice things looking a little different the next time you log in. For starters the login page looks different:

Group Office Login Page

And the main landing page looks different:

Group Office Main Page

Group Office just went a system update to Version 6.4.106. The update generally affects the overall look and feel. However the same functionality exists from the previous version. There may be a few new features and you may experience a little bit different user interaction. Rest assured all the data is still there. If you get stuck or need help click on “Help” under your profile icon in the top right corner:

Group Office Help

Please let us know at webmaster@sawe.org or feel free to share a comment to the blog if you can’t find something or have trouble getting around.

SAWE’s first ANSI standard has been published!

ANSI/SAWE STD M-4-2020 “Supplier Weight Control for the Marine Industry” was approved by ANSI on January 9 and will be published on January 17, 2020. It supersedes Recommended Practice M-4 (2012) “Vendor Weight Control for the Marine Industry”.

Congratulations go to Greg Roach, Terri Husley-Crawford, Andy Schuster and the Marine Industry Committee for their hard work and dedication to this task. All members of SAWE should be proud of this achievement.

With this publication the SAWE has shown it has the capability to create Voluntary Consensus Standards aligned with the USSS, (United States Standards Strategy) which in turn supports creation of ISO, International standards. Publishing our Recommended Practices as ANSI/SAWE Standards brings increased visibility to those documents and recognition to the SAWE as a standard developer.

The SAWE has been a member of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) since 2012 and an accredited Standards Developing Organization (SDO) since 2014. The SAWE participates in International Standards Organization (ISO) sanctioned standards development work as an SDO for the United States’ sole member to ISO, which is ANSI.

The benefits of ANSI membership were described in a previous blog post by Jeff Cerro here (https://www.sawe.org/blog/2018/08/20/the-benefits-of-ansi-membership-to-the-sawe-society-corporate-and-individual-members/).

Less Weight = GO FAST

On November 7th 2019 The SAWE San Diego Chapter partnered with San Diego State University’s Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) team Aztec Racing to host an university outreach event. SAWE San Diego President Brian Wang gave a presentation on an overview of mass properties engineering and the SAWE while students were treated to pizza and refreshments provided by the chapter. The event was a huge success and was received well by a packed room of enthusiastic engineers that are pursuing degrees ranging from mechanical, aerospace, electrical, biomedical, and many more! After the presentation a Q&A session was held where students and chapter members were heavily engaged discussing topics ranging from career experience to how can Aztec Racing be more weight conscience in their 2020 design. Following, SAWE San Diego presented Aztec Racing with a hard copy of The SAWE Weight Engineers Handbook to add to their library and also encouraged students to join SAWE to receive the many benefits provided for free! Finally a generous tour of Aztec Racing’s garage shop was conducted by President Dani Phan and Chief Engineer Austin Hoang. Many questions were asked from how can the team validate the 2020 car’s weight, CG and inertia while chapter members were able to discuss possible solutions. The SAWE San Diego Chapter is currently in discussions on formally supporting Aztec Racing in an advisory role.

Aztec Racing Formula SAE Team is a 501(c)3 non-profit student-run organization at San Diego State University.  Formula SAE is an international collegiate design competition focused on a student designed and manufactured open wheel race car. Every year the team is tasked with raising funds to design, build, test, and compete nationally against competing collegiate teams.

From Left: Aztec Racing Chief Engineer: Austin Hoang, SAWE San Diego Member: Tracy Strand, SAWE San Diego VP: Buda Kasthuri, SAWE San Diego Treasure: Alan Perez, SAWE San Diego President: Brian Wang, SAWE San Diego Director: Jared Turnak, SAWE San Diego Member: Doug Fisher, Aztec Racing President: Dani Phan