Facilitated by: Dirk Petersen, Dan Raymer, Anjie Emmett, Fred Brown

To see and feel the product, in its various stages of manufacturing, as well as talking to the people manufacturing it, has its value for the work of a Mass Properties engineer.

Moderated and narrated by highly experienced Mass Properties Engineering professionals, meeting participants will be taken on a journey of experiences in the Marine, Aircraft and Space industries. Participants are encouraged to interact and contribute to this forum.

Facilitated by: Dirk Petersen, Dan Raymer, Anjie Emmett, Fred Brown

Have you read the science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? The main plot is the search for a question which fits an answer they have in hand, but do not understand.

If you listened to the SAWE Virtual Conference in 2024 several presenters mentioned “This is what I need to ask the right question”. Like the novel we seem to have something in hand. But what is it?

Is it just one question, or is it a multiple set of questions? What are the dependencies of the question(s)? Is it always the same or is it dependent on the phase, on the project, the supplier, the customer or something else.

Where do you learn to ask the right question? Is it documented somewhere?

The combined knowledge of the audience ensures that we understand what we have in hand, are able to find the answers to these questions and ensure that all participants will gain knowledge.

It will not take us 10 million years to find the right question(s), and the answer to those will not be “42”.

Facilitated by: Amanda Cutright, SAWE VP – Technical

The SAWE is proud to present our 13th Virtual Forum, a speaker and audience participation venue provided to inform and debate important issues in mass properties engineering. This forum’s topic is “Pathways in Mass Properties Engineering Digitalization.” The forum will be conducted by our VP-Technical – Ms. Amanda Cutright (NASA Langley representative to the Agency’s Digital Engineering Leadership Team).

Our first speaker will be Mr. Rupert Wilmot-Dunbar from Capgemini corporation; leaders in integrating data technology into corporate engineering practices. We will follow up this discussion with an introduction to an evolving SAWE initiative to be led by Mr. Mark Beyer of Beyer Flight Sciences, which aims to create some digital harmony standardization across all of our SAWE product sectors and product development life cycle stages.

The Forum will be via TEAMS and will run for an hour and a half commencing on Friday, August 23rd at 12:00 EDT.

Capgemini’s digital transformation insights were highlighted at our recent May international meeting during the Wednesday morning forum. We will get a more complete understanding of what it means for companies, and their engineers, to embrace digital continuity in integrated design environments. Capgemini has shown how multi-data models are utilized in this evolving digital world and forum attendees will get the chance to query how Mass Properties might fit into these types of modern engineering collaborative practices.

Following Mr. Wilmot-Dunbar, Mr. Mark Beyer will introduce a SAWE initiative aligned with this forum’s topic. Mark has planned an approach that will require participation from our members and the companies they work for to build common digital definitions and procedures which cover all of our member activities in Mass Properties Engineering. Data models, use cases, and documentation needs are some of what is to be fleshed out within this SAWE year. This team will develop a shared vision and digital transformation roadmap. If this work piques your interest, I’m sure Mark will want to hear from you.

Questions will be permitted during the presentations, and upon completion the floor will be open for general discussion.

Dirk Petersen, Airbus Operations GmbH

Statistical weight estimation methods were among the first to be developed and are still in widespread use. Collecting and maintaining information for a parametric database is a vital part in estimating the Mass Properties of a new product during its early phase. This data needs to cover modern products and include the designs of competing companies. The trend by companies to handle required data as proprietary information restricts their distribution. This influences the ability to forecast the Mass Properties of the next product, which will have an effect on its successful launch and development.

This forum will gather options to collect parametric data whilst maintaining proprietary rules and discuss workarounds and their drawbacks. It intends to identify how the SAWE can support.

Facilitated by:
Robert Zimmerman, Lockheed Martin (Retired)

Have you ever had an unexpected result from weighing or measuring an object? A measurement that is not consistent with those that have come before? These data “outliers” can consume a lot of time and effort to explain/understand. Sometimes they remain a mystery because we are forced to move on due to work flow and resource limitations. But outliers may provide vital information about the health of our processes and we need to understand them.

Outliers are not uncertainties. Outliers are – in general – not foreseeable nor quantifiable and if undetected or untreated may bias the result. Methods exist to categorize extreme values as outliers and to treat them, if necessary.

However, the mass properties industry often has challenges that make this exercise difficult: very small data samples; analysis performed long after hardware has been weighed and shipped (limiting investigation options), are two examples.

This forum aims to gather the most used methods of treating outliers by mass property engineers and to discuss advantages and disadvantages.

Facilitated by:
Robert Zimmerman, Lockheed Martin (Retired)

The SAWE presents its 10^th Virtual Forum, a panel and audience participation venue to inform and debate important issues in mass properties engineering.  The SAWE will look behind the scenes of Artemis 1, the first human-capable moon mission in 50 years.   What were the challenges?  How was mass properties involved?  And looking ahead – what is in store for future Artemis flights?

SAWE members, academics, and industry participants will start the discussion by providing some basic information on hydrogen properties and how that fuel type might affect transportation vehicles’ design/use. SAWE Offshore is included as well, being a possible infrastructure from which to generate, process and ship stored hydrogen to energy storage destinations. There are already applications of hydrogen use in ground, air, space, and marine transportation elements. Those vehicles as well as those of historical nature, and of future dreamed implementation, will be discussed.

Throughout topic overviews, the forum includes audience participation by requests for comments, and seeks further exchange of information coming from our virtual gathering. There is undoubtably a growing fraction of SAWE members becoming involved in hydrogen fueled transportation concepts. Our forum encourages continued growth in developing common understandings which this change imparts on SAWE products’ design, manufacturing, and operations.

Along with SAWE moderator Jeff Cerro, NASA Langley Research Center our planned SME’s include:

Mr. Joe Rainville: Bell Aircraft – Fuel Cells, Aircraft and Ground Vehicles
Sr. Mauro Evangelisti: Director, Gas and Heat, Livorno Italy – Marine Industry
Tobin Lee and Brandin Northrop: Boeing Aircraft and Space Systems
Andy Schuster: Principal in SAWE and Meta-MPE LLC – Offshore Energy, Marine
Dr. Theo Dingemans: CTO BlueSky Polymers, and Professor UNC Chapel Hill, – H2 Permeation