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Automotive vehicle body electrophoretic (e-coat) and paint application has a high degree of complexity and expense in vehicle assembly. These steps involve coating and painting the vehicle body. Each step has multiple coatings and a curing process of the body in an oven. Two types of heating methods, radiation and convection, are used in the ovens to cure coatings and paints during the process. During heating stage in the oven, the vehicle body has large thermal stresses due to thermal expansion. These stresses may cause permanent deformation and weld/joint failure. Body panel deformation and joint failure can be predicted by using structural analysis with component surface temperature distribution. The prediction will avoid late and costly changes to the vehicle design. The temperature profiles on the vehicle components are the key boundary conditions used to perform structure analysis.

Increasing demands on engine power to meet increased load carrying capacity and adherence to emission norms have necessitated the need to improve thermal management system of the vehicle. The efficiency of the vehicle cooling system strongly depends on the fan and fan-shroud design and, designing an optimum fan and fan-shroud has been a challenge for the designer. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques are being increasingly used to perform virtual tests to predict and optimize the performance of fan and fan-shroud assembly. However, these CFD based optimization are mostly based on a single performance parameter. In addition, the sequential choice of input parameters in such optimization exercise leads to a large number of CFD simulations that are required to optimize the performance over the complete range of design and operating envelope. As a result, the optimization is carried out over a limited range of design and operating envelope only.

At the rear of the vehicle an end acoustic silencer is attached to the exhaust system. This is primarily to reduce noise emissions for the benefit of passengers and bystanders. Due to the location of the end acoustic silencer conventional thermal protection methods (heat shields) through experimental means can not only be difficult to incorporate but also can be an inefficient and costly experience. Hence simulation methods may improve the development process by introducing methods of optimization in early phase vehicle design. A previous publication (Part 1) described a methodology of improving the surface temperatures prediction of general exhaust configurations. It was found in this initial study that simulation results for silencer configurations exhibited significant discrepancies in comparison to experimental data.

The performance of the Transmission Oil Cooler (TOC) is influenced significantly by the TOC plumbing lines which transmit the oil from transmission system to the oil cooler and back. Designing the optimum TOC plumbing line with lesser pressure drop is the need of the hour considering the complex nature of the vehicle packaging. Reducing the pressure drop increases the oil flow rate through the transmission which results in optimum performance. Improved transmission efficiency in turn shall improve the engine efficiency and performance. The improvements obtained from increased transmission and engine efficiency shall result in an overall increase in vehicle fuel economy. Optimization solutions are required in the early product development cycle where the components are not readily available and/or are prohibitively expensive to do testing. In such scenarios, one-dimensional (1D) simulations shall be employed to compute the pressure drop for faster and economical solutions.

The increasing importance of electric mobility results into the need for optimizing all power train components to further reduce the energy consumption of the vehicle. The aim of this study is to predict the thermal behavior and the pressure losses in water jackets of electric machines by use of CFD. The heat loss of electric machines in passenger cars is sufficient to let its components reach critical temperatures. For this reason, the optimization of heat dissipation plays an important role. The goal of efficient heat dissipation is a high heat transfer coefficient. At the same time, the pressure loss should be low in order to reduce the required power of the pump. Flow simulations can help to evaluate different water jacket concepts in an early stage of development. In this work, the validation of flow simulations in water jackets is based on measurements of a simplified geometry with constant boundary conditions.

Adequate visibility through the automobile windscreen is a critical aspect of driving, most often at very low temperatures when ice tends to be formed on the windscreen. The geometry of the existing defroster system needs to be improved in the vehicles, with the main aim of substantial increase in air mass flow reaching the windscreen through defroster nozzles and appropriate velocity distribution over the windscreen, while respecting all packaging constraints. The reason of this study is to investigate the windscreen deicing behavior of a vehicle by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with the main concern of improving deicing process by design an appropriate defroster. Two different defrosters with completely different geometry are considered for this purpose. A detailed full interior model of an existing vehicle is created via CAE tools.

An innovative system has been developed to remotely monitor and record customer usage patterns of the Hyundai Genesis HVAC system in real time by smartphone. The data monitored includes dozens of HVAC-related parameters, including driver and passenger set temperature, blower setting, mode and intake position, internal software parameters, etc. This information and understanding of real-world usage of American customers enables design and test engineers to better satisfy customer demands for automatic temperature control performance. This study identifies areas in need of improvement Preliminary findings of this study suggest that auto mode usage is highest in mild temperatures and lowest in hot soaking conditions. In hot soak conditions (above 35C cabin temperature), the majority of American customers manually control the temperature and blower speed.

Automated testing of manufactured products reduces the lead time to considerable extent in the process of production to delivery. Products like automobiles demand automated testing, for which robots and vision systems are widely employed. The basic functionality of a vision system in automation is to detect an object and then recognize it. In current automotive industry such systems are being used for robotic guidance, component tracking, dimensional gauging etc. There is a need to test the proper functionality of a speedometer fitted on a motorbike in the production line itself. Focused work on detection and recognition of Analog type and Digital type speedometer console reading of a motorbike is described in this paper. A vision based system is proposed which recognizes the speedometer reading instantaneously at the desired time.

Automobile cabin acoustical comfort is one of the main features that may attract customers to purchase a new car. The acoustic cavity mode of the car has an effect on the acoustical comfort. To identify the factors affecting computing accuracy of the acoustic mode, three different element type and six different element size acoustic finite element models of an automobile passenger compartment are developed and experimentally assessed. The three different element type models are meshed in three different ways, tetrahedral elements, hexahedral elements and node coupling tetrahedral and hexahedral elements (tetra-hexahedral elements). The six different element size models are meshed with hexahedral element varies from 50mm to 75mm. Modal analysis test of the passenger car is conducted using loudspeaker excitation to identify the compartment cavity modes.

Materials used in automotive components play a key role in providing crash safety to passengers and pedestrians. DuPont's lightweight hybrid material technology, which combines injection molded fiber reinforced plastics with drape molded woven composite materials, provides safety engineers with stiff energy absorbing alternatives. In an effort to validate the hybrid material's crash performance while avoiding expensive crash testing, numerical tools and methodologies are applied in evaluation of a hybrid composite test beam. Multi-scale material models capturing nonlinear strain-rate dependency, anisotropic characteristics, and failure criteria are calibrated on a fiber reinforced plastic and a woven fabric. The fiber orientation and warp/weft angles were extracted from injection and drape molding simulation.

This paper examines the pace at which manufacturers have added certain powertrain technology into new vehicles from model year 1975 to the present. Based on data from the EPA's Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and Fuel Economy Trends database [1], the analysis will focus on several key technologies that have either reached a high level of penetration in light duty vehicles, or whose use in the new vehicle fleet has been growing in recent years. The findings indicate that individual manufacturers have, at times, implemented new technology across major portions of their new vehicle offerings in only a few model years. This is an important clarification to prior EPA analysis that indicated much longer adoption times for the industry as a whole. This new analysis suggests a technology penetration paradigm where individual manufacturers have a much shorter technology penetration cycle than the overall industry, due to “sequencing” by individual manufacturers.

With significant decrease in the background noise in present day automobiles, liquid slosh noise from an automotive fuel tank is considered as a major irritant during acceleration and deceleration. All major international OEMs and their suppliers try to reduce sloshing noise by various design modifications in the fuel tank. However, most major activities reported in open literature are primarily based on performing various CAE and experimental studies in isolation. However, noise generation and its propagation is a multiphysics phenomenon, where fluid mechanics due to liquid sloshing affects structural behaviour of the fuel tank and its mountings which in turn affects noise generation and propagation. In the present study a multiphysics approach to noise generation has been used to predict liquid sloshing noise from a rectangular tank.

There are a couple of ways to manufacture aluminum cylinder blocks that have a good balance between productivity and abrasion resistance. One of them is the insert-molding of a sleeve made of PMC (Powder Metal Composite) by the HPDC (High Pressure Die Casting) method. However, in this method, cracks are apt to occur on the surface when the PMC sleeve is extruded and that has been a restriction factor against higher extrusion speed. The authors attempted to raise this extrusion temperature by eliminating the Cu additive process from the aluminum alloy powder in order to raise its melting point by approximately 50 °C. This enabled the wall of the extruded sleeve to be thinner and the extrusion speed to be higher compared to those of a conventional production method while avoiding the occurrence of surface cracks.

Increasing urbanization, the growing degree of motorization and traffic performance in urban areas and environmental aspects like greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) are the motivation for a detailed analysis of personal individual mobility in urban areas, which is presented in this study. In the first step, the publication examines a study of market potential of new small and lightweight vehicle concepts. A mobility inquiry conducted in a mid-sized European city enables an estimation of the potential user groups for alternative vehicle concepts for individual urban traffic. In a second step, the CO2 reduction potential of urban car concepts is simulated for a generic vehicle fleet. This fleet consists of conventional vehicles of various classes (subcompact, compact, mid-sized …) as well as new lightweight urban car concepts. A novel vehicle concept for urban transportation will be presented as well.

In this paper, it is explained how composite structures, made of continuous fibers embedded in a polymer matrix, are designed and analyzed in the aerospace industry. The strategy is based on the building block approach, in which the knowledge on the composite material and structure is built step by step from the coupon level up to the final full scale structure. Damage is then discussed, as it can't be ignored when composites are concerned. The approach available in the SAMCEF finite element code is then described. It is based on the continuum mechanics approach, and allows studying the progressive failure of composites in the plies and at their interface (so considering delamination). The material models are described, and their use is illustrated at the coupon level. The identification procedure for this damage models is also discussed.

For achieving vehicle light weighting, the motion deviation is calculated for substitution of PMMA glazing for inorganic glass. In this paper, a test method is proposed to measure and calculate the motion deviation of the dual-curvature glass. To simulate the dual-curvature glass, the torus surface is fitted with least square method according to the window frame data, which are measured by Coordinate Measuring Machine. By using this method, the motion deviation of PMMA glazing and inorganic glass can be calculated, which can not only validate the effectiveness of motion simulation, but also compare the performances. The results demonstrate that the performance of PMMA glazing is better than that of inorganic glass and the simulation results is validated.

In the new combustion strategies such as RCCI and dual-fuel combustion, the diesel pilot injection plays a pivotal role as it determines the ignition characteristics of the mixture and ultimately the combustion and emission performance. In this regard, equivalence ratio distribution resulted from the pilot injection becomes very important. In this work, computation study is carried out using KIVA-3V to simulate the engine compression stroke from intake valve close (IVC) to close to TDC so as to investigate the impact of piston geometry, injection start timing and flow initialization on the equivalence ratio distribution from a pilot injection in HSDI engine.

This paper investigated highly precise control of the air fuel ratio (AFR) of a gasoline engine in a transient state acceleration or deceleration at several starting engine speeds and several intake valve opening (IVO) timings. First, a two-input and one-output linearized engine model was developed for the design of the AFR control system. In order to compensate for the AFR deterioration caused by the actuation of the throttle valve during acceleration or deceleration, a feed-forward (FF) controller was developed based on the model. In order to add adaptability to the FF controller, a compensation using an error value from the AFR target value was equipped. The feedback (FB) system was designed using a backstepping method that is well known as an adaptive controller for a non-linear system.

Reducing unsprung mass of the car is a representative method to enhance the ride & handling performance and fuel efficiency. In this study, brake disc weight is reduced 15∼20% using a hybrid type material. The basis for this study is the separation of the friction surface and HAT(mounting part). Aluminum material is applied in the HAT for a light weight effect. Gray iron is applied in the friction surface section to maintain braking performance. Two types of joining between aluminum and cast iron are developed. One is the aluminum casting method utilizing a gray iron insert and the other is a bolted assembly method. Detailed structure, process and material are optimized using try-out & dynamometer experiments. The Reliability of this development is proved through durability (dynamometer and vehicle) testing.

In this work, combustion and pollutant formation phenomena in a direct injection Diesel engine are studied using n-Dodecane as fuel. The initial part of work is to validate the results from three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the engine experimental data. Various state-of-the-art models for simulating the droplet spray, impingement, collision, boiling and combustion are employed with the full kinetic mechanism. Extended coherent flame model for three zones predicts the averaged in-cylinder pressure data within 5 % of the experimental readings. CO, CO2, UBHC and NOx are found to be within the error limits between the CFD and experimental results. The CFD study is further extended towards the addition of little EGR for achieving lower NOx emissions and partial injection of fuel in the intake stroke followed by main injection. To facilitate the easy evaporation and mixing of fuel, preheated air is introduced.