JCI's New Laboratory

HOLLAND, MI — Johnson Controls Inc. opens a new and improved Advanced Materials and Process Engineering (AMPE) lab at its technical center here.

The facility began humbly in 1994 with a small room and two pieces of equipment and has evolved into a state-of-the-art, spacious laboratory packed with equipment capable of analyzing the performance and compatibility of materials used in vehicle interiors.

“When you look at a lot of the things we do, you think of them mainly as large pieces and parts that go into vehicles: seats, overheads, door panels, what have you,” says Paul Dickensheets, vice president and general manager for JCI's interior systems and engineering operations.

“But those panels get made up of a variety of different materials. And from the beginning of the process, when we're starting to design which materials and even what processes and equipment we need to use to fabricate the parts, that's really where this lab comes into play.”

The lab is used to look at the way various materials will react to temperature and compression pressure and evaluate how they will interface with other materials, says Dickensheets.

It focuses on three different areas, says Steve Hollingsworth, group manager-Advanced Materials and Process Engineering, North America. The first area is materials and process research.

“Anything we put in our parts, they analyze it and determine how it's going to perform within our products and processes and how to optimize the process before we even run a part,” says Hollingsworth of the lab. “It gets us out of a lot of trial and error.”

Materials to be analyzed can include anything from adhesives and composites to textiles and foams, he says. JCI even tests the viscoelastic properties of different greases. That way it can make sure a sunglass bin, for example, opens smoothly and evenly no matter what climate a vehicle happens to be in.

The lab also develops test methods for materials that are exclusive to JCI. “A lot of headliner technologies are proprietary to JCI. And (because) no one manufactures them the way we do, no one has a way to test them the way we do,” says Hollingsworth.

The lab also performs failure analysis of materials and/or components.

“By bringing that into our development phase, and also our validation phase when we're going through launch, we're able to resolve that stuff up front,” he says.

“It doesn't get to the customer, it doesn't get to the end consumer. We don't have warranty concerns from it; we find it up front and we're able to figure out what is it, why is it failing and how can we fix it.”