(Waterloo). Oscar joined Waterloo following a 23 year career in research, engineering and management practice in industry and government. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of engineering design methodologies, design practice, engineering education and high performance, lightweight, composite materials design. Oscar is passionate about teaching engineering and, as part of his current role, maintains strong industry-university relations and a commitment to remain close to engineering design and management practice. Before joining Waterloo, Oscar held the position of Sr. Program Manager at L-3 Communications Wescam (L-3 Wescam), a manufacturer of airborne surveillance systems for public safety, security and defense markets. Oscar had been employed at L-3 Wescam for 11 years, where he led multidisciplinary teams toward the successful development and commercialization of several products to various markets. He was responsible for L-3 Wescam's largest defense programs. Oscar worked at the Canadian Forces Department of National Defense failure analysis lab, where he was the Canadian Project Officer for an international program on F/A-18 bonded repair, and prior to that, a Research Engineer at the Canadian Space Agency. Oscar designed and qualified space flight hardware for a space experiment for Space Shuttle Flight STS-52 in 1993. Earlier in his career Oscar led the design and development of products employing composite materials at Owens Corning Canada and contributed to the development of novel production machinery for the fottwear industry with Bata Engineering. Oscar earned a Master of Applied Science degree in Mechanical Engineering specializing in lightweight composite material structures from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada). He became a licensed professional engineer in 1986. Oscar lives in Guelph, Ontario, Canada with his wife Dianne, and they are blessed with three (3) wonderful sons. Harry Tempelman, Hitachi Construction Truck Mfg Ltd. Harry Tempelman is a mechanical engineer who has 25 years of design experience in Aerospace and off-highway vehicles. Prior to joining Hitachi, he was the president of TDT Inc., a consulting company specialized in design, stress analysis, material selection, and manufacturing solutions. He's been with Hitachi Trucks since 2005 as the senior manager of the Technical Analysis Group. The group is currently working on some projects related to truck dynamics, engineering optimization, fatigue analysis, frame/body design, and material selection.

In this paper, simulation of the casting and heat treatment processes of front spindle of a rigid dump truck are presented. The objectives are to present how the different operations can be simulated in order to predict the local phases in the different areas of the part. To reach these objectives, two software packages are used in sequenced. The first one, Thercast, is used to simulate the casting operation. The second one, Forge, is applied to the water-quenching simulation. The general formulations used are shortly presented in this paper. The aim of casting simulation is to compute the metal behavior from the liquid state at the pouring stage to the solid state during cooling into the mold. Filling and cooling phases simulations, taking into account the air gap, ensure that no internal defects like shrinkage, porosity, micro porosity or hot tearing are taking place into the part. Forge software allows the water quenching stage simulation. A model is used to deduct the IT diagram (Isothermal Transformation diagram) from the material composition. The initial grain size influences the transformation kinetics. Another main phenomenon is the efficiency of the cooling bath. The results of the simulation (phase distribution, distortion, residual stresses) strongly depend on these input conditions. Thus, the effect of input data variations on final results must be studied. The modeling approach is validated by comparisons with micrographic observations. Another solution to determine the reliability of the models is to observe the local properties in the quenched part. The prediction of the local micro hardness can be used to evaluate the accuracy of the quenching models.

This paper deals with the utilization of topology optimization in the design process. Topology optimization is considered the most challenging task in the structural design optimization problems because the general layout of the structure is not known; however, implementing it in the conceptual design stage has proven to reduce the cost and development time. In this paper, the design process is briefly discussed emphasizing the use of topology optimization in the conceptual design stage. Also, the mathematical formulation for topology optimization with material density contours is presented. Furthermore, two industrial case studies, related to off-road mining and construction trucks, are discussed where the use of topology optimization has proven to dramatically improve an existing design and significantly decrease the development time of a new design.