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In recent years, the increased use of electric power steering in vehicles has increased the importance of issues such as making systems more compact and lightweight, and dealing with increased development man-hours. To increase development efficiency, the use of a “Hardware in the loop simulator” (HILS) is being tested to shift from the previous development method that relied on a driver's subjective evaluation in an actual vehicle test to bench-test development. Using HILS enables tasks such as specification studies, performance forecasts, issue identification and countermeasure proposals to be performed at an early stage of development even when there is no prototype vehicle. This report describes a case study of using HILS to solve the issues of reducing the load by adjusting the geometric specifications around the kingpin and eliminating the tradeoff by adding a new EPS control algorithm in order to make the electric power steering (EPS) more compact and lightweight.

Due to recent environmental problems as well as requirements for better quality for automobiles, research for high performance asbestos-free friction materials on the brake system was conducted. The mechanism of brake noise and causes for brake judder have been analyzed. As a result of research, non-asbestos, non-steel friction material with main fibers of carbon and aramid was developed. The newly developed friction material showed superior features of higher friction coefficient along with stability, brake noise, brake judder, and wear resistance compared with conventional non-abestos materials. Also, a new testing method to evaluate friction materials were applied.