Siavash Suttar and Von Jamora won first and second places in the poster awards category at the Automotive Composites Conference and Exhibition (ACCE) held in August.

ACCE is the world's leading automotive composites forum. The event provides excellent networking opportunities and draws over 800 speakers, exhibitors, and attendees from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The ACCE event is designed to educate and update the automotive design and production engineers, sales personnel, and management from transportation OEMs and Tier suppliers about the benefits and expanding importance of thermoset and thermoplastic composites in passenger vehicles, light trucks, and other ground transportation applications.

Sattar and Jamora worked on polymer composite materials, specifically on computational modeling and simulation of advanced manufacturing. Composites materials tailored to targeted applications provide lightweight and structural characteristics required in the aerospace and automotive industries.

Sattar's project collaborates with an industrial material developer for automotive applications using thermoplastic composites that can be molded within minutes to produce a final part. Jamora's project was done in collaboration with NASA researcher on automated fiber placement (AFP), looking at manufacturing induced deformation during the AFP process, which deposits thin strips of material with robotic equipment.

About the students:

Siavash Sattar is a PhD candidate and a full-time research/teaching assistant in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Old Dominion University (ODU). His doctoral research is on the analysis of structure-property relationship for discontinuous fiber reinforced polymer composites, with the focus on progressive damage modeling to provide the structural characteristics required in automotive industry. He is also working on the micromechanical computational modeling of freeze-casted porous ceramics to predict the effective mechanical properties. Siavash received his master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tafresh University, Iran, where he studied the computational modeling of cold roll-forming manufacturing process and the three-dimensional moving boundary condition model of paint cure oven used in automobile industry. Siavash is a committee member of the International Student Advisory Board at ODU.

Von Jamora is a graduate research assistant for the Composite Manufacturing and Modeling group at Old Dominion University. He graduated from Landstown High School's Technology Academy, where he participated in a NASA competition. He earned his bachelor's degree at ODU and worked as a mechanical engineering tutor during his undergrad. He has previous work on using upcycled composite materials and studying their structure-property relationships along with website building for this senior design. He has a master's degree in mechanical engineering with a thesis on the finite element analysis of composite shell structures made through automated fiber placement. He is currently researching the process modeling of composite structures in finite element analysis for his Ph. D. through custom subroutines in the program Abaqus. Von Jamora was an immigrant from the Philippines but has lived in the US for most of his life.