Mars builds success with tire, rubber product testing software

AKRON—Will Mars' biggest ideas used to be held together with nuts and bolts, electrical tape and maybe even a little Super Glue.

In those days—his earliest days of innovation—inspiration was welded into place. Ingenuity clicked together with Legos. Because making, doing, building, problem-solving is who he is.

It's what he's aways done.

And it was all of that—the science and math and let's-figure-it-out—that helped to define his childhood. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to be an engineer.

Maybe, he thought, he'd make a career in electrical engineering like his father. Or perhaps he'd follow the footsteps of a family friend and pursue mechanical engineering. He did, after all, adore aerospace with its planes and rockets and air ships.

All he knew was that he wanted to build something. Make something. Something that would make an impact.

Growing up in Northeast Ohio as the oldest of 10 children, Mars found plenty of time to test his great, big engineering ideas. Take for instance, the upcycled tricycle he and siblings once designed.

"Somehow we had a pile of old bicycles in our yard and my dad had a welder," Mars said. "One time we took a bunch of the bikes and welded them all together into a huge thing with three wheels and lots of bike frames holding it all together.

"We actually went on the road with it," Mars said with a laugh. "It was a multi-person vehicle. It had three people—you had a steering person and you had two pedaling people in the back. It was sort of a tricycle-type of configuration."

It was fantastic, he said.

It just wasn't built quite well enough.

"It didn't last very long. I hadn't learned about stress analysis just yet," he joked.

Today, Mars' biggest ideas look a little bit different. They're calculated and coded instead of soldered. They're tested and tweaked, rewritten and reworked until he gets them just right.

And those ideas of his are having an impact. They're changing the tire and rubber products industries.

Mars is founder and president of Endurica L.L.C., an analysis firm that provides comprehensive CAE workflows for fatigue analysis of elastomers. The company is built around software that he designed, software intended to predict the durability of elastomers and elastomeric products facing the stresses and strains of real-world applications.

And it is for his innovations in the fatigue analysis sphere that Mars was awarded the 2022 Harold Herzlich Distinguished Technology Achievement Medal during the biennial International Tire Exhibition & Conference. The award recognizes individuals throughout the tire industry whose careers and accomplishments have left a lasting impact on tire design, development and manufacturing.

Mars' first foray into coding came during a high school science fair and a project that focused on aerodynamics. And while he didn't realize it at the time, it was a glimpse of what would lie ahead for him professionally and personally.

"I built a wind tunnel," Mars said. "… I wrote code that would calculate airflow over a wing. I'd calculate lift and drag and that kind of thing, and then go measure it in my wind tunnel."

After graduation, Mars attended the University of Akron to study mechanical engineering with a polymer specialization. As part of the program's requirements, he interviewed for and secured a co-op position with a rubber industry company. But weeks before the co-op was set to start, the opportunity fell through.

"The lady at the university who was helping co-op students find jobs called me up and said there is a position at Cooper (Tire & Rubber Co.). 'Are you interested in tires?' I was like, do I have a choice? Is it a job? Is it engineering? Then yes."

Turns out, Mars would come to love tires, thanks in no small part to his time at Cooper.

After graduation, he was hired full time at the tire maker and worked under John Luchini, a man who not only introduced him to computer simulation, but encouraged him to do things he never thought he could.

"When I was first at Cooper, my first job was to build the thermal code. They could calculate forces and stresses and strains, but my job was to add temperature to the list," Mars said. "We used that for two or three years—and I felt all accomplished. The company was using my software.

"What happened was: instead of focusing on how we build and maintain this code, it became how do we make good use of what comes out of the code? OK, I've got stress and strain and temperature. What does that mean for durability? I focused on durability."

And that simple question—"what does that mean for durability?"—changed his entire world.

While still working at Cooper Tire, Mars began to build a software program that could do just that. With Luchini's encouragement, he pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Toledo and focused his work on the multiaxial fatigue of rubber.

"(John) was the one who said you really should get a Ph.D.," Mars said. "I think he recognized in me a desire and that creative fountain—that need to build stuff."

And build Mars did.

He created what ultimately became the foundational fatigue analysis simulation software—critical plane analysis—on which Endurica is built.

"The core idea behind critical plane is a 'Murphy's Law' principle," Mars said. "Cracks are possible in every orientation, so we check all of them. The worst case is always the one that actually happens in practice. We did a huge experimental validation study on this and showed that we could predict not only the fatigue life, but also the crack orientation that would occur under any multiaxial loading scenario."

The concept took fatigue testing to entirely new levels.

"A lot of the fatigue testing they do is stretching, repeatedly up and down; it's one direction of loading," Mars said. "But in a tire, you have this (stretch) combined with this (twist) and there are all sorts of weird combinations. So we had experiments where we did fatigue tests that had all sorts of different directions in them and I showed that my algorithm could predict what would happen in all of those cases. It worked really well."

So well, in fact, that Cooper applied for and received a patent for the software.

"I knew I had something really cool, and my boss knew that I had something cool, and we (at Cooper Tire) did nothing with it, which really just drove me bonkers," Mars said. "If you create something that works, you want to see it get used."

Maybe, Mars thought, it was time to step out on his own. And when Cooper agreed to turn the patent over to him, he took the first steps toward building his own business.

Launching his own company was one of the biggest risks he's ever taken. And in many ways, he was navigating blindly. But he wasn't doing it alone.

Mars found support from Rocket Ventures and was connected to a small business counselor who helped him develop a business plan, determine the potential market for the software product and establish potential pricing options.

"I called up other software companies and pretended that I wanted to buy their software and I got their pricing," Mars said. "Pretty soon we started to put together a plan for what you may be able to charge."

Mars' vision for Endurica was starting to take shape. But the pieces had yet to fall into place. And it wasn't until he started getting some unsolicited phone calls about his software that he found his way forward.

The Army, through its Small Business Innovation Research program, was seeking to have someone develop fatigue code that would predict the life of rubber tank track pads. The one-page call for proposal detailed the project and what the Army had hoped to do with the prediction and analysis software. And that proposal cited three papers.

"It just so happened that I wrote two of those papers," Mars said. "I had never heard of a SBIR. But because they cited my papers, people who chase this kind of grant money started calling me. … And the call was always the same: 'Hey do you want to be our partner on a project?'

"I was still working at Cooper, and I started to put two and two together. I looked online for this project and then I found the proposal. I thought: Wait a minute. They are going to give someone three quarters of a million dollars to do what I have already done. I shut down all the people who called me. I took a day of vacation from Cooper, I took the business plan that I had already written, and I turned that into my proposal.

"And then I won."

The SBIR project was broken into three phases. During the first phase, Mars was able to do the SBIR work on nights and weekends, meaning he could keep his engineering job at Cooper, which is what he did.

But Phase II of the project demanded a little bit more.

"It was: you can only have this money if it is full time for reals," Mars said. "That was the point at which I sat down with my wife, we went on vacation and said 'are we really going to do this? Now you have to choose.'

"She was like, this is what you have been doing and if you don't do it now, you're not ever going to do it. She said: Go."

Endurica, at its foundation, was tire-centric. But when Mars hit the ground running with his company just about 15 years ago, he focused on non-tire products—the rubber tracks, of course, but also automotive bushings and mounts, among others.

Things were going well, but when the certainty of the SBIR project came to close, Mars knew he would have to grow Endurica further, taking it to its next chapter.

"It is terrifying," Mars said, remembering a conversation he had with his father about the transition, "because you feel as if you are running toward a cliff. And you also feel like the answer is run faster, run harder. Your instinct says stop, but no, you can't because that will kill what you are doing."

So Mars ran.

He ran hard and fast into the unknown, growing the business as best he could and investing back into it as much possible. Today, the company has nine employees and it's finding successes across a range of industries—including tires.

Endurica's growth potential also lies in the automotive space, where sustainability and disruption have slid into the driver's seat. Harnessing that potential across the new mobility space will be key, and Endurica is poised to do just that.

The company also added exponentially to its expertise when Thomas Ebbott joined Endurica as vice president. He brings more than 35 years of industry experience to the team and positions the company to take advantage of growth opportunities on the horizon.

It's growth that comes with changing expectations for proving the safety, performance and, of course, durability of products across the automotive industry.

"My strategic goal for Endurica has been we need to get to the place where the OEMs say to the supply base, 'we will not accept a design from you unless you have simulated the durability.' At that point we are going to become unavoidable," Mars said.

And that time for Endurica to shine is almost here.

General Motors, Mars said, has been very vocal about its expectations surrounding simulation and its use in the development of parts and products used on GM vehicles. By 2025, GM has said, it will require simulation testing.

Other OEMs have signaled they could be taking similar approaches, Mars said, and that could change the game of the automotive industry.

The good news is that Mars believes he has an answer—a big idea that has already had a big impact.

And for the tire industry, at least, he has the medal to prove just how big that impact has been and could be.