Search Results

Estimation by World health organization reveals that by 2020, road traffic injuries may be the third leading contributor for the cause of death with significant proportion of pedestrian causalities [9]. Pedestrian safety was not considered essential for vehicle design for developing countries, due to the vehicle manufacturer's reluctance to invest in area not governed by legislation, unavailability of new car assessment programs. However, as regulatory norms are turning out to be more stringent with increased competition of NCAP star ratings, advancements in vehicle research, significant progress in this field of safety is being made without compromising on contradictory fields like vehicle low speed insurance, stiffness etc. This paper provides an insight into the recent findings at MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA'S R&D centre, aimed at improving the lower leg pedestrian performance in the new model design with special attention to NCAP ratings.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used extensively in the optimization of modern passenger car to meet the ever growing need of higher fuel economy, better engine and underbody cooling. One of the way to achieve better fuel economy is to reduce the vehicle overall resistance to flow, know as drag. Vehicle drag is a complex phenomenon governed by vehicle styling, component shape, layout and driving velocity and road conditions. To reduce the drag a lot of aero-parts are used these days such as air-dam, skirts, spoiler, undercover, dams etc. However the design of these aero-parts must be optimized to get the desired result as their addition alone does not guarantee improvement in performance. This paper aims at studying the effect of air-dam height and position on vehicle aerodynamics. Also the effect of air-dam addition was verified using fuel economy simulations.