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The latest requirements for automotive cabin comfort require lower sound levels inside the cabin. There are many sources contributing to this noise of which fan is an important one. The blade passage noise of the cooling fan is often unpleasant and it is generally expensive to build and test different prototypes for optimum noise performance. Also, traditional unsteady computational approaches for predicting the fan noise are time and resource consuming and do not fit within the design cycle time. This paper proposes use of a steady state computational technique to predict the fan noise performance which provides for effective design study with optimum resources. The steady state data is used with the wave analogy to predict the overall sound pressure level. First, the computational results were validated with the experimental data for a base case and then parametric study was carried out to have optimum design.

In India, three wheelers are the major mode of the public transport used by common people. The competition in the market necessitates to develop a vehicle for maximum customer satisfaction. One of the important attribute of vehicle is passenger ride comfort. In the past, majority of the work on the ride comfort study has been carried out on passenger vehicles, which are mostly owner driven, but no detailed study has been carried out on quantification of driver as well as passenger ride comfort for a three-wheeler. In the present exercise, major emphasis has been given to ride comfort of the passenger and to characterize them with different makes of three wheelers. There are number of algorithms available to quantitatively measure the performance of ride comfort. The most popular one is ISO 2631. These standards are primarily developed based on response of human organs to different frequency range.

In the absence of Anthropometric and Ergonomic data on Indian Driving population, a project entitled “Ergonomic study on Indian driving population” was under taken by The Automotive Research Association of India, Pune with assistance of the Government of India and the Indian Automotive industries. The objective was to survey and compile anthrpometric data in standing, sitting and preferred driving position for 4-wheeler and 2-wheeler driving positions to assist the automobile manufacturers in India to cater their design to Indian population and make an Indian driver comfortable. This paper briefly presents the methodology adopted for the survey along with the results. Also studies were conducted on finger pressure, hand pressure and foot pressure exerted by the driver, which would serve as the baseline data for designing controls for the vehicle. A comparison with a typical American data has revealed many correlation and differences.