Light Breakfast

A light breakfast is included for attendees that preregister for speaker series. A registration table will also be available for registrants who wish to pick up event materials and for walk-in registrants. Walk-in registrants are welcome, but meal tickets may not be available.

Opening Reception

Attendees that preregistered for the speaker series are invited to the opening reception, featuring guest speaker David Salmela and remarks from Scott See, Executive Director of the Keweenaw National Historical Park Advisory Commission. A registration table will also be available for registrants who wish to pick up event materials.

DEVELOPMENT OF CONFORMABLE CNG TANK FOR AUTOMOTIVE APPLICATION

The purpose of this study is to design, develop and integrate a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) tank that will have a conformable shape for efficient storage in a light-duty pick-up truck. The CNG tank will be a simple rectangular box geometry to demonstrate capability of non-cylindrical shapes. Using CAD drawings of the truck, a conformable tank will be designed to fit under the pick-up bed. The intent of the non-cylindrical CNG tank is to demonstrate improvement in size over the current solution, which is a large cylinder in the box of a pick-up truck. The geometry of the tank’s features is critical to its size and strength. The optimized tank design will be simulated with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to determine critical stress regions, and appropriate design changes will be made to reduce stress concentration. Following the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) guide, different aluminum alloys will be optimized to obtain the best possible result for the CNG tank.