Braking of Road Vehicles course

The course, updated annually, has been running since 1997 and provides technical education in the subject area of brakes and braking systems for professionals in the Automotive Industry and associated organisations including OEMs, suppliers, legislative organisations, government, police, and armed forces, in the UK, Europe and worldwide.

It is a comprehensive course starting from the fundamentals of brakes and braking systems for car and commercial vehicle applications. Many recent developments in the field of braking are considered and both theoretical and practical standpoints are addressed. It is designed to facilitate discussion and interchange of experience between course members and lecturers who are all expert practitioners in their own field.

The course is intended for engineering, technical and professional staff in the industry who would benefit from a period of concentrated study in this important branch of automotive engineering. The course is broad enough in concept to benefit vehicle engineers generally, as well as those with specialist brake interests.

A degree, technical diploma, HND or HNC, or some professional qualification and practical experience is desirable, though not essential.

Continuing Education Certificates of Attendance are issued to participants. These count towards individual CPD records. Delegates are offered the opportunity to undertake a course assessment which, if successful, will result in academic credit to count towards a higher degree.  Benefits of the course include:

• up to date guidance on the field of braking, with particular focus on road vehicles - cars and commercial vehicles.
• application of content to other fields including industrial engineering, aerospace, motor cycles, railways.
• Employers ncreased knowledge and understanding in the field of braking, in particular a broader understanding, e.g. friction materials for vehicle designers, legislation for materials suppliers, or basic theory and science for researchers.
• Insight into the way other braking specialists have dealt with the same challenges

There are opportunities to ask questions and talk to academic staff working in a range of related fields. The broad range of companies and organisations represented each year at the course (usually over 30 different companies and organisations from all over the world) provides a first class networking environment.

Each Delegate receives a book of the course notes which is convenient and up to date for ease of reference.

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Failure Mode Avoidance course

Many industries are facing the challenge of developing increasingly complex products with higher and higher standards of quality and reliability in time and cost competitive environments. This is particularly challenging for the automotive sector where production rates of one per minute, uncontrolled customer usage of the product in the field, product complexity, and frequent product upgrades all combine to make the task of engineering technically difficult.

Failure Mode Avoidance (FMA) delivers a step change in the effectiveness of business and engineering processes associated with product creation, from product definition to launch. Under this paradigm a failure mode is defined as any business condition (technical, planning, procedural) that will require a change (fix or countermeasure) to the current plan.

The impact of changes on the economics of product development is well known: any such change (and engineering changes in particular) is essentially a waste, which ultimately via cumulative and sometimes multiplicative effects, will affect the quality, cost and timing of the new product development and introduction.

The fundamental conjecture of the FMA philosophy is that failure modes only have to be found and fixed once. The cost effectiveness of any new product development and launch can be enhanced if potential failure modes are discovered as early as possible in the product creation process since early discovery gives more latitude for the selection of a countermeasure and requires less cost to implement the countermeasure.

Failure Mode Avoidance represents a disciplined approach to engineering which uses practices that both minimize the number of potential failure modes in the first place and ensure that all remaining failure modes are discovered, and countermeasures are implemented, as soon as possible.

The process has been pioneered by Ford Motor Company as part of their business turnaround strategy and has the active support of senior European management. Automotive suppliers and other industries engaged in the design and manufacture of volume product would also benefit from the Failure Mode Avoidance approach.