Stars and cars In the family

Shifting forward

When the squillionaire rock star, oil magnate or Hollywood producer orders 20 top-of-the-range luxury German sports cars with identical colours, fittings and specifications, there is a fair a chance a young New Zealander will be on the design team.

Massey technology graduate Simon Bate is living his childhood dream of designing and building some of the world’s finest and fastest cars.

Currently with the giant German company Audi AG, he has for the past seven years lived in Germany working on some of the most famous brands in the automotive world, including Mercedes and Porsche.

His employer, quattro GmbH, is an Audi subsidiary responsible for customising the factory models. He works with a team of about 500, about a quarter of them in the design area.

“In New Zealand when I grew up I always wanted to be involved in car design and development. It was my dream. I was fascinated by European cars, always drawing designs of actual and imagined cars and I could tell you the acceleration speeds of all the models.”

Bate, 34, went to Awatapu College in Palmerston North and completed a Bachelor of Technology in product development with first class honours at Massey in 1993.

He then went to England for nearly two years, gaining a Master’s in automotive design from Coventry University.

He spent a couple of years back in New Zealand working for the Land Transport Safety Authority before returning to Europe and finding work with Ruf Automobile GmbH, a company which modifies Porsches in the same way AMG customises Mercedes Benz, BMW has M, and Audi quattro.

Today he lives in the town of Neckarsulm (pop. 15,000, “a bit like Feilding”) about 40 minutes drive from his former Stuttgart base in southwest Germany.

Stuttgart is where motorcyles and four-wheeled motorcars were invented by Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz and subsequently industrialised by Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1887. It remains a stronghold of the international automotive industry, the name even appearing in the Porsche badge.

He says the Massey degree that set him on this path was valuable for the broad range of skills it encouraged. “Product development is the complete process of designing and manufacturing at product, including researching the market, setting your aims, objectives, constraints, doing the brainstorming, idea generation, screening those ideas, developing and launching the product, and assessing marketplace performance.

“It teaches you how to design successful products in a systematic way. It was multi-disciplinary, so you learnt a lot of stuff like foundational engineering skills, mathematics, also marketing, design.

“We had a good overview of all these different things which I think is good for going on to management. I was interested mainly in the manufactured product design side, as opposed to processed products.”

Science and physics at school – and a chemistry catch up just before starting – helped get him into the course.

“Things like metal work and tech drawing were helpful but probably not essential. I think it’s always important when you’re developing stuff to know how things work and how they feel mechanically with your hands.”

In the German car industry tertiary qualifications are respected, Bate says. “They even said when I was at Mercedes that if I had a PhD it would have made it easier to get into management positions but at Audi they have a policy that they pay you for the job you do and not for your qualifications.

“The workplace is mainly Germans with a sprinkling from all over the world but you speak, write and read in German and that’s quite a challenge.”

Large companies tend to strictly enforce the law on working hours, which are restricted to 10 a day. Audi actually specifies that staff in this field may not start before 7am or finish later than 6.45pm.

That means anyone who goes in earlier will not be paid for their time before 7am, he says, and anyone who leaves later may find themselves ticked off for doing so.

“Outside the building where I work are rows and rows of new Audi RS4s and these new sports cars they’re building and several Lamborghinis as well that they use as test mules for new Audi and Lamborghini components.

“These days Audi is considered to be pretty much on a par with Mercedes and BMW. Having worked at Mercedes, I know that they consider Audi to be, particularly with the quality of the interiors the yardstick, better than Mercedes. The image is perhaps slightly different, but from a quality perspective they’re comparable.

“Audi have just recently launched the S6 which is the sports version of the A6, which is a 5.2 litre V10 with something like 450 horse power. That’s pretty impressive.”

Equally impressive is the sheer spending power of some of the customers.

While the escalating cost of fuel means car designers are paying closer attention than ever to fuel, the buyers of quattro vehicles are wealthy enough not to care.

They are prepared to pay top dollar -– or Euro – to not only get the best but to have it customised to their individual preferences.

“We’ve actually got customers who are celebrities and I can’t tell you who they are – household names, musicians, royalty from around the world – and they order a car and they want this colour and this interior, this trim, special stuff and we deliver it.

“I did hear of a guy who ordered 20 of the top model Audis the other day, all the same, apparently so he can have them stationed all round the world and every country he would get out at the airport and have one of these Audis looking exactly the same as all the other places. I can’t remember his name but, again, I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

What he likes about living in Germany, apart from the car industry, is its location in central Europe.

“Drive about three hours south of here and you have the choice of the German, Austrian, Swiss and Italian alps. I particularly like the Italian alps. I was in the Dolomites in early June with a friend visiting from New Zealand. It was just before the main European summer when it gets very crowded and we had a wonderful time.”

When he is not visiting friends, touring Europe or working, Bate is involved in a Christian inter-denominational church in Stuttgart. The church is international and largely English-speaking.

He enjoys the connections it gives him in a society where people can be inclined to keep to themselves but says primarily it is about his belief in God and the purpose and meaning that gives him.

He finds it slightly disappointing that the majority of Germans call themselves Christian yet many of the historic churches are under-utilised and often the people have almost no actual faith, although they might not appreciate the distinction.

“New Zealanders are a little different in that a lot are quite clear that they don’t even consider themselves to be Christian, it’s more openly secular.”

He does note considerable pride among Germans, including in his own (Protestant) church, at the election of the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

There is even a car story to go with it: The German owner of a Volkwagen Golf discovered that the new Pope was a previous owner of the car and was then able to sell it in an internet auction for many times its market value.

Bate says he misses family and friends in New Zealand and tries to return once a year or at least every 18 months.

Car design as a career is something that you have to be truly keen on, he reckons.

“If you’re really nuts about it, like I was, and you want to go for it, you can do it. I think if you’re a New Zealander you don’t want to forget that a job that takes you overseas has its benefits but, being away from home, there’s a price to pay.”

Frames from one of Professor Bate’s simulations, stars and brown dwarfs begin to form in the dense cores of an originally-uniform gas cloud 2.6 light-years across and containing 500 times the mass of the Sun. The final frame shows the state of the cloud at 190,000 years.

Starmaker

Massey alumnus Matthew Bate is Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Exeter University. In early 2006 he returned to New Zealand to holiday and visit family. He spoke with Massey’s Professor Tony Signal.

Your Massey degree was a double major in physics and computer science. What was the draw?
Physics was my main interest, right through school and on to university. When I was a teenager I built a telescope with my father; I still have it. My interest in computer science also goes back to school days. I joined the computer club during my first year at Palmerston North Boys’ High.

Computer science and physics was a good combination. What I do now is numerical astrophysics, so it’s computationally-based. I run fluid dynamics codes but in an astrophysical context.

And astrophysics?
At the end of Massey I had to decide between astrophysics or particle physics and I decided particle physics was a bit too abstract. I wanted more hands on, plus I had always been very interested in astronomy. Mum says it was because I was born two weeks after the first moon landing, but I am not sure that has much to do with it.

Did you feel at a disadvantage to students who had studied astrophysics when went to Cambridge University for your PhD?
Astrophysics is basically just applied physics. If you have a good background in maths and physics, anything else you can pick up on the way. In fact, in some ways I think it is best to do ‘hard’ physics first rather than astrophysics.

What exactly do you work on at Exeter?
I am probably best known for using supercomputers to model the formation of star clusters. The models begin with a turbulent cloud of hydrogen and helium gas, usually ranging from one to several light years across and containing anywhere from fifty to a thousand times the mass of our sun. As these gas clouds evolve, regions within them collapse under their own gravitational weight, and once that collapse begins the formation of a star or several stars is inevitable. In the animations on my website [see http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk] you can see clouds of gas collapsing to form clusters of tens, dozens, or even hundreds of stars.

So is it a matter of writing the computer code and letting the program run or is there more to it?
Over a decade has gone into the code’s development, so now you just set the initial conditions, let it run, and wait – the simulations run on many processors, but they still take many months to perform.

While I am on holiday here in New Zealand I have a calculation chugging away in the UK. I just log in from time to time to check on it.

Then you analyse the results of those simulations, looking at the statistics of objects and comparing them to the statistics of observed systems.

You can look at the distribution of stellar masses and the numbers of stars you see in binary star systems as opposed to single stars like our sun. You can look at the radii and masses of the discs of gas surrounding the stars and then compare that with the numerical simulations to get an idea of what physics you are missing in the calculations.

Analysing the properties of the smaller clusters is quite easy; you almost know each object by name. But when you are dealing with around 1000 objects you need to have some good ways of analysing the data. The total amount of data from each simulation is around one or two terabytes. The analysis can take as long as the simulation itself.

What is the relationship between observation and theory?
There’s a lot of information that you can compare things to. The nearest star-forming regions to us are about 500 light years or so away. With the Hubble space telescope we can get quite a good picture of how stars are forming.

Astrophysics is still an observationally-driven subject. We are always seeing new things, especially, at the moment, in planet formation.

I don’t do observations myself, but I talk to and work with a lot observational astronomers and they like the theoretical models because they make testable predictions. All the time you have an interplay between theory and observation. Observers will tell you that they can observe such-and-such, and you will fit that with your models and make more predictions.

For example?
The best example I can give you relates to the formation of brown dwarfs. These are stars whose mass is too small for them to fuse hydrogen into helium. So when they form they are very bright but they fade away over time.

The first brown dwarf was discovered in 1995, but we now know of hundreds of them and we are getting an idea of their masses and how common they are.

The numerical simulations I have done seem to show that brown dwarfs start to form in interstellar gas clouds as if they were stars, but that gravitation interactions eject them soon after they form, before they have had enough time to accumulate much mass. Stars form in the same way, but they sit there longer and gather more mass.

Using this model you can make predictions about what it means for the properties of brown dwarfs in particular. If they have to undergo interactions with other brown dwarfs and with stars in order to be ejected, then you wouldn’t expect them to have companions such as other brown dwarfs orbiting around them. And indeed, while some do come in pairs, the pairs of brown dwarfs all seem to be much closer together than typical stellar binaries, and this may be an indication that the model is correct.

But it is only an indication, so many observers are putting in time measuring the number of brown dwarfs in binaries. Young brown dwarfs also have discs around them which will presumably form planetary systems. The models predict that these discs should be very small, but for the moment our instruments lack the resolution to measure the sizes accurately. This is an instance where observation is lagging behind modelling.

How do you observe brown dwarfs?
When they first form, brown dwarfs are quite bright, so one place to look is in star-forming regions where stars are only typically one to two million years old – our sun, by contrast, is five billion years old. The other place to look is in regions which are close to us: those within about 30 light years. Infrared telescopes can pick out brown dwarfs if they are close enough. This is a good way of finding binary pairs of dwarfs as the separation between the pairs is quite wide in the sky and you can actually resolve them with the Hubble telescope and the ground-based telescopes in Chile and Hawaii.

You have also had some influence on the way we think planets form.
I have been interested in how Jupiter-like planets – very massive gas-type planets – form. [Jupiter is 318 times more massive than Earth and has 1300 times the volume.] Until we found other planetary systems we thought that all planetary systems would be like ours with terrestrial rocky planets in close and gas giants out further. But when we began to find other planetary systems – and we now know of about 200 planets – we found they were very different to ours. Many have massive gas-type planets like Jupiter but in very close orbits – orbits closer to their stars than Mercury’s orbit is to our sun. This raises many questions about how these planets form and behave.

If you go back to the literature, you find that back in the 1980s someone predicted that once a giant gas planet forms it should slowly spiral in closer and closer to its star. People had rejected this idea because it didn’t match with our own solar system, but now it has been resurrected.

So I have been looking at the interaction between a protoplanet and the gaseous disc in which it is forming. Basically the planet loses angular momentum as it spirals in towards the star, and it gives that angular momentum to the disc. But this raises other questions, such as does the planet stop nearing the star at some point or does it spiral into it, and if it stops, what makes it stop?

Another question is how the planet forms. The typical model for Jupiter-mass planet formation starts with dust: the dust particles stick together, you end up with metre-sized rocks, they then collide together to give you planetesimals [larger objects, many with a diameter of around 10km], and eventually you end up with an Earth-sized object of say 10 or 20 Earth-masses, and once you end up with that mass you have run-away gas accretion on to that object.

Most people favour this rocky-core-and-runaway-accretion theory. But if we look at Jupiter – and space probes have been sent to Jupiter – then the best we can say is that the core is somewhere between zero and around 15 Earth-masses. Now close-to-zero would be a big problem: it would mean there is no core there for this accretion model to work.

But there is another possibility: a gravitational instability in the gas disk leading to an immediate collapse to form a Jupiter-sized object. This is something I have been modelling.

How are you enjoying Exeter?
Devon, the county Exeter is in, has nice beaches and the moors for hiking and tramping, so it’s a good place for outdoor activities, and Exeter itself is big enough to have what you want but not so big you feel trapped.

What is your life outside work?
My job means I get to get to travel a lot to international conferences and seminars, and I enjoy that. Family – I have a wife and two children – work and travel take up most of my time, and I garden a bit as well.

And the Exeter astrophysics programme now has a New Zealand connection.
Yes, that’s right. In Exeter’s Master of Physics – a degree similar to a BSc Hons in New Zealand – the students have the option of spending their third year abroad in Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand. The New Zealand option, which was first offered a couple of years ago, is proving the most popular, beating Australia hands down. But of course we need universities to send students to.

Currently we have one student here at Massey and there will probably be more here next year and in future years.

I will look forward to seeing them, and to more Massey students heading Exeter’s way.

Professor Matthew Bate

Professor Matthew Bate graduated from Massey in 1991 with a BSc in Physics and Computer Science and with a BSc (Hons) in Physics from Massey in 1992. Supported by a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Prince of Wales Scholarship, he gained his PhD in astrophysics at Cambridge University, graduating in 1996.

He began work as a lecturer at Exeter University in 2001, shortly after the University’s astrophysics programme was founded. He was appointed Reader in 2003 and Professor in 2005.

In 2003 Professor Bate was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme prize, an award carrying with it £50,000 in funding over two years towards the cost of research. In 2005 he was named as one of 25 European Young Investigators. The accompanying funding of £900,000 will enable Professor Bate to devote the next five years of his career to research and to fund research staff and postdoctoral students.