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Vegetable oils and its esters are being considered seriously for internal combustion engines. It has many advantages such as it is renewable, nontoxic, sulphur free and biodegradable. But there are several problems associated with its use in diesel engines such as lower thermal efficiency and higher smoke levels compared to diesel. One of the methods by which these problems can be tackled is by blending of diesel (DSL) with biodiesels. In this work coconut oil biodiesel and castor oil biodiesel which are obtained from different sources are chosen, considering the wide variation in properties such as viscosity and degree of unsaturation. For coconut oil biodiesel (COBD) and castor oil biodiesel (CSBD), iodine value, which is an indication of the degree of unsaturation, was determined experimentally. The property influence on the performance of COBD and CSBD and its blends with equal volume with diesel was studied.

Unburned hydrocarbon (HC) emission results because part of the fuel inducted into the engine escapes combustion. HC emission is dependent on many mechanisms such as adsorption and desorption of fuel in oil layer, flame quenching, fuel escaping into crevices and accumulation of fuel in engine deposits, etc. Out of these, the oil layer adsorption/desorption mechanism contributes to about 25-30% of total engine-out HC emissions. In this work adsorption/desorption mechanism is studied considering the engine to be fueled with different fuels. The fuel adsorbed/desorbed in lubricating oil is modeled with a one-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE). One dimension PDE is chosen as the transverse flow across the oil film is considered to be negligible. The PDE is solved using finite difference explicit scheme in which the space derivatives and the time derivatives are approximated with a second order central difference method and forward Euler method, respectively.

The performance of any automotive engine depends not only upon its core engine parts but also on the effectiveness of the sub-systems attached to the engine, like the intake, fuel, engine cooling and exhaust systems. The exhaust system being a critical system of any automotive vehicle plays a responsible role of improving the ride quality of the vehicle and fuel economy. The effective design of exhaust system is critical in order to ensure the required exhaust gas is exited from the engine and at the same time the noise is attenuated. In this paper a novel approach is developed in order to characterize the flow through the cold end exhaust system and reduce the pressure drop to achieve desired performance. The exhaust system attenuates the noise from the engine without deteriorating the engine performance by ensuring an optimum value of exhaust back pressure.

The OEM's aim is to reduce development time and testing cost, hence the objective behind this work is to achieve a flexible stateflow model so that changes in the application during supply chain or development, on adding/deleting any switches, varying timer cycle, changing the logic for future advancements or else using the logic in different application, would end in minimal changes in the chart or in its states which would reflect least changes in the code. This research is about designing state machine architecture for chime/buzzer warning system and wiper/washer motor control system. The chime/buzzer stateflow chart includes various input switches like ignition, parking, seat belt buckle, driver door and speed accompanied with warning in the form of LED, lamp and buzzer. The logic is differentiated according to gentle and strong warning. Various conditions and scenarios of the vehicle and driver are considered for driver door and seat belt which is resolved in the chart.

Design of vehicle structure to provide safe structural environment for occupants of vehicles involved in high speed (> 15 km/h) collisions has drawn considerable resources as safety of humans is at stake. Low speed impacts, since these do not cause severe injuries to the occupants, do not generate much concern. However, structural design for this situation has generated a lot of interest among insurance companies as the structural damage caused by these types of collisions is substantial, requiring significant payments by the insurance companies. In this work alternative designs for crash-box have been assessed for RCAR (Research Council of Automotive Repairs) requirement for frontal crash. Using structural details of an existing sedan, various designs of crash-box that can be fitted within the packaging space have been assessed for low speed impact.

This article delineates the importance of infrastructure and its related aspects on sustainability of transportation on global and local context. Almost 7% of the GDP in India is spent on transportation and 6% of the CO2 emissions in the world is due to transportation. In countries like India, the road transport has significantly grown over other forms of mobility. This articles introduces different forms of transportations that exists today and the importance of sustainability in transportation sector. Sustainable transportation depends on development of infrastructure to enable smart transport solutions involving intelligent transport system, electric mobility, information management, vehicle health monitoring, advanced traffic management system and driver assistance system in a vehicle. The challenges includes existing transport operations, environmental impact and complexity of existing transport network.

This paper describes static and fatigue behavior of resistance spot welds with the stack-up of conventional mild and advanced high strength steels, with and without adhesive, based on a set of lap shear and coach peel coupon tests. The coupons were fabricated following specified spot welding and adhesive schedules. The effects of similar and dissimilar steel grade sheet combinations in the joint configuration have been taken into account. Tensile strength of the steels used for the coupons, both as-received and after baked, and cross-section microstructure photographs are included. The spot weld SN relations between this study and the study by Auto/Steel Partnership are compared and discussed.

This paper depict the difference in the endurance factor of safety with usage of static and quasi static FE analysis and corrective measures take to solve the problem. The importance of the dynamic loading and subsequent effect of it on the multi axial fatigue analysis. Considering the modern trend prevailing among the vehicle manufacturers and specifically talking about two wheeler industry, it is clear that while the engine remains the same but the frame is changed to cater the market with new models to cut down on the development time. Initially the crankcase was designed for a double cradle frame where the crankcase was mounted on the frame. Later, the frame design was changed to single cradle where engine acts as a stress member link. This kind of arrangement makes the crankcase mountings participate in the chassis loads. Therefore, the crankcase mounting experiences road loads when the vehicle encounter the road irregularities.

Since the inception of the IIHS Small Overlap Impact (SOI) test in 2012, automotive manufacturers have implemented many solutions in the vehicle body structure to achieve an IIHS “Good” rating. There are two main areas of the vehicle: forward of vehicle cockpit and immediately surrounding the vehicle cockpit, which typically work together for SOI to mitigate crash energy and prevent intrusion into the passenger zones. The structures forward of vehicle cockpit are designed to either 1) absorb vehicle energy from impact to the barrier, or 2) provide enough strength and rigidity to aid deflection of the vehicle away from the barrier. The structures which are immediately surrounding the vehicle cockpit (known as pillars and rocker/sills) are traditionally components designed to be highly rigid sheet metal panels to protect the occupant during crash events.

In this paper, a new beam element is developed for the purpose of capturing thin-walled beam’s collapse mechanisms under dynamic load such as impact load and will be validated in the next phase. Such beam element can be used to create simplified finite element models for crashworthiness analysis and simulation and, therefore, will significantly reduce the modeling effort and computing time. The developed beam element will be implemented into LS-DYNA and validated through crashworthiness analysis and simulation. This paper introduces the approach of deriving the new element formulation.

The ride comfort of heavy trucks is related to many factors, which include vehicle operating scenarios and vehicle structure parameters. An investigation of the influence of different factors on the ride comfort of heavy trucks was conducted. Based on the elastic theory of a uniform Euler-Bernoulli beam with both ends free, a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) half rigid-elastic vibration model of the vertical dynamic response was developed. The rigid-elastic model is more suitable to describe the actual movement of heavy trucks. The DOFs include vertical displacements of the body and each of two axles, the pitch displacement of the body, and the first and second order bending displacements of the body. The root mean square (RMS) values of body accelerations, dynamic deflections and relative dynamic loads form the evaluation index. Based on the rigid-elastic model, the influence of different factors on the ride comfort of heavy trucks is analyzed in the frequency domain.

The powertrain mounting system (PMS) plays an important role in improving the NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) quality of the vehicle. In all running conditions of a vehicle, the displacements of the powertrain C.G. should be controlled in a prescribed range to avoid interference with other components in the vehicle. The conventional model of PMS is based on vibration theory, considering the rotation angles are small, ignoring the sequence of the rotations. However, the motion of PMS is in 3D space with 3 translational degrees of freedom and 3 rotational degrees of freedom, when the rotation angles are not small, the conventional model of PMS will cause errors. The errors are likely to make powertrain interfering with other components. This paper proposes a rigid body mechanics model of the powertrain mounting system. When the powertrain undergoes a large rotational motion, the rigid body mechanics model can provide more accurate calculation results.

An active suspension system has better performance than a passive suspension. However, it requires a significant amount of energy and is constructed from high cost components. To solve the problem of the power required, a switchable damper suspension system has been studied. In this paper, control strategies for the switchable damper suspension system and passive are compared in terms of their relative ride performance capabilities. Practical limitations involving switching time delay and threshold delay values are modeled and their effect on the ride performance are evaluated. The four setting switchable damper is compared with the two and three setting switchable dampers. The control strategies are used to maintain suspension working space level within design limit and to minimize body acceleration level. The results showed that the four setting switchable damper gives better ride improvements compared with the two and three setting switchable dampers.

Stamping die design recommendations attempt to limit the production of burrs through accurate alignment of the upper and lower trimming edges. For aluminum automotive exterior panels, this translates to a clearance less than 0.1 mm. However, quality of sheared edge and its stretchability are affected by stiffness of the cutting tool against opening of the clearance between the shearing edges. The objective of the study is to investigate the influence of stiffness of trimming or piercing dies against opening of the cutting clearance on sheared edge stretchability of aluminum blanks 6111-T4. For experimental study, one side of the sample had sheared surface obtained by the trimming process while the other side of the sample had a smooth surface achieved by metal finish. Burr heights of the sheared edge after different trimming configurations with 10% clearance were measured.

During the 4 last years, Lean has been successfully implemented in one of the Tenneco’s Business Units: Ride Performance. This paper reflects on the results and more specifically on the third principle of Lean [1] “How to make flow” and on the fifth principle “To strive for perfection” obtained in the fields of “Product Development” related to Processes, Tools and People. Processes and Hard Tools. How to improve the flow in the engineering processes? It will be shown that In general standardized processes supported by some integrated tools and, more specifically Some workload leveling in testing, CAD Departments, Standardization in design processes, testing procedures and prototypes development processes and Standardization and availability of components and parts for prototype building are key enablers to enhance flow in the Product Development.

The development of an automotive hood for an electric vehicle based on a polymer-metal hybrid configuration is described in this paper. Here, special focus is given only to the engineering design and prototyping phases which are the initial stages of a much bigger project. A project that aims to evaluate the cost efficiency, weight penalty and structural integrity of adopting polydicyclopentadiene as an exterior body material in low production volume vehicles, among them the electric ones. For the engineering design and prototyping phases, three different reinforcement geometries were developed and six mechanical simulations were done through finite element analysis to aid best frame geometry selection and optimization. The entire hood was then prototyped containing the optimized geometry. The fabrication of the frame was made through metal stamping and the exterior panel through reaction injection moulding. Adhesive bonding was used for its assembly.

Conventional approaches for the fatigue life evaluation of automotive parts like headlamps involves the evaluation of random stress conditions in either the time or frequency domain. If one is working in the frequency domain the fatigue life can be evaluated using one of the available methods like the Rayleigh (Narrow Band) approach or the more recent Dirlik method. Historically, the random stresses needed as input to these methods have been evaluated by the FEA solver (eg Abaqus, or Nastran) and these “in built” stress evaluations have limitations which relate to the fact that the stress conditions are complex and so the common “equivalents” for stress like von-Mises or Principal have not been available. There have also been limitations in the location and method of averaging for such stresses. In addition, the fatigue calculation approach for doing the evaluation has been constrained to the linear stress based (S-N) method.

The exhaust manifold is one of the engine components which is used to collect the burned gases from the cylinder head and send it to the exhaust hot end aftertreatment system with low engine backpressure. The main purpose of the automotive exhaust manifolds are providing a smooth flow field and must be able to endure thermo-mechanical loadings. The present paper explains the CAE analysis method to assess the design of exhaust manifold of a heavy duty diesel engine. Coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses were performed to solve the flow field within the exhaust system and surface convection loading prediction at fluid side and obtain temperature distribution at solid region of exhaust manifold domain. The metal temperature prediction provided by thermal model is used to carry out the durability analysis of the structure.

In amorphous solids such as fused quartz, the failure mechanism under cyclic loading is very different when compared to metals where this failure is attributable to dislocation movement and eventual slip band activity. Standard mechanical fatigue prediction methodologies, S-N or ε-N based, which have been historically developed for metals are rendered inapplicable for this class of material. The fatigue strength of Fused Silica or Fused Quartz (SiO2) material is known to be highly dependent on the stressed area and the surface finish. Stable crack growth in Region II of the V-K curve (Crack growth rate vs Stress intensity factor) is dependent on the competing and transitional effects of temperature and humidity, along that specific section of the stress intensity factor abscissa. Fused glass (under harsh environment conditions) finds usage in Automotive, Marine and Aerospace applications, where stress and load (both static and cyclic) can be severe.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that frequency domain methods for calculating structural response and fatigue damage can be more widely applicable than previously thought. This will be demonstrated by comparing results of time domain vs. frequency domain approaches for a series of fatigue/durability problems with increasing complexity. These problems involve both static and dynamic behavior. Also, both single input and multiple correlated inputs are considered. And most important of all, a variety of non-stationary loading types have been used. All of the example problems investigated are typically found in the automotive industry, with measured loads from the field or from the proving ground.