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The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS) introduced driver side small overlap test in 2012 and added the passenger side small overlap test in 2018 to the top safety pick plus ratings requirement. The injury of a passenger’s outboard right foot in the passenger-side small overlap rigid barrier (PSORB) test is of more concern compared to the driver’s outboard left foot in the driver-side small overlap rigid barrier (DSORB) test. The reason is, the passenger’s right foot is positioned just above the carpet on the toe pan, and is closer to the barrier during the PSORB impact event, unlike the driver’s outboard left foot in DSORB, which rests on a stiff foot rest. So it is often necessary to develop countermeasures to protect the passenger from lower leg injuries.

The purpose of the 4-SPACE (4-Stroke Powered gasoline Auto-ignition Controlled combustion Engine) industrial research project is to research and develop an innovative controlled auto-ignition combustion process for lean burn automotive gasoline 4-stroke engines application. The engine concepts to be developed could have the potential to replace the existing stoichiometric / 3-way catalyst automotive spark ignition 4-stroke engines by offering the potential to meet the most stringent EURO 4 emissions limits in the year 2005 without requiring DeNOx catalyst technology. A reduction of fuel consumption and therefore of corresponding CO2 emissions of 15 to 20% in average urban conditions of use, is expected for the « 4-SPACE » lean burn 4-stroke engine with additional reduction of CO emissions.

The main challenge facing the automotive passenger car industry for the next decade is CO2 emission reduction. The approach towards achieving conformity with stricter regulations is based on two main enablers: by means of powertrain improvement and energy demand reduction, adopting a low rolling resistance (RR) tire without decreasing driving dynamics. The trade-off between RR and driving dynamics can be managed by means of the trade-off between the tread shore hardness (TSH) and belt angle inclination (BAI) of the tire. Based on current tire production, four submission tires have been produced with different combinations of TSH and BAI, both RR and/or driving dynamics oriented. In total five submission tires have been tested and evaluated in terms of RR, subjective handling and ride, objective handling, and braking.

More stringent Federal emission regulations and fuel economy requirements have driven the automotive industry towards more sophisticated vehicle thermal management systems to best utilize the waste heat and improve driveline efficiency. The final drive unit in light and heavy duty trucks usually consists of geared transmission and differential housed in a lubricated axle. The automotive rear axle is one of the major sources of power loss in the driveline due to gear friction, churning and bearing loss affecting vehicle fuel economy. These losses vary significantly with lubricant viscosity. Also the temperatures of the lubricant are critical to the overall axle performance in terms of power losses, fatigue life and wear. In this paper, a methodology for modeling thermal behavior of automotive rear axle with heat exchanger is presented. The proposed model can be used to predict the axle lubricant temperature rise.

In the light duty diesel segment, the need persists for an advanced control system to monitor the health of an aftertreatment system throughout a vehicle’s life in order to maintain compliance with ever tightening emissions levels. In on-board diagnostics (OBD), every diagnostic is validated during development stages to detect when a system under monitoring of that diagnostic has failed. This necessitates the need to create parts which represent a failure that would be observed on the vehicle. These failed parts, referred to as limit or threshold parts, are developed through a limit part creation process. Although there are commonalities amongst Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), each OEM has their own detection logic which will require a unique and specific limit part. Various methods exist for creating these limit parts, and each method produces a different combination of ability to detect the failure and its associated tailpipe emissions.

Automotive manufacturers are facing stronger and stronger pressure to optimize all aspects related to fuel consumption of cars, and aerodynamic drag makes no exception, due to increasing government enforcing rules for the reduction of the emissions and the increasing influence of aerodynamic performance on fuel consumption with WLTC and RDE driving cycles. Nowadays, CFD simulation is a common tool across automotive industries for the assessment and the optimization of vehicle resistance in the design phase. The full power of these numerical methods of studying many design variants in advance of experimental testing, however, can be fully exploited when coupled with optimization techniques, always keeping into account constraints and aesthetical demands. On the other hand, a massive use of CFD optimization can lead to unaffordable computational efforts or a limitation of the design exploration space.