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The production unit number of small diesel engine cars tends to decline except recreational vehicles in Japanese market in recent years, while the production unit number in Europe market keeps on increasing owing to the merits of the durability and the fuel consumption. The small diesel engines will have to be improved in the near future by solving major problems such as noise and vibration pollution, environmental pollution, improvement in performance of diesel engines, in order to expand the production of the engines. This paper refers to a basic study on the experimental and analytical methods for the reduction of resonant vibration in each vibration mode on some cylinder blocks of small high-speed diesel engines in rated engine speed range. Hammering test method, which is easy and useful for measuring frequency response functions, is carried out in the experiments.

The regulations of Formula SAE® competitions restrain design, tuning, and improvement on engine in order to keep safety on driving. The competitors have basically chosen a 600 cc, 4-stroke engine for motorcycle according to the regulations. Therefore, it is necessary for higher engine performance to improve combustion by investigation of air intake and exhaust component design while the regulation agreement is the most important factor. Recently, many competitors have been using a high performance Engine Control Unit (ECU) easy to suitably control the engine combustion. The competitors can focus on optimization of the intake and exhaust components using ECU. Best tuning of each component is very difficult work because the design factors of these components have complicated relations with engine performance. Here, our interest is a method to reduce the optimization time of the system.

The core education of the Faculty of Engineering at Kokushikan University is creative engineering education by manufacturing generally on the base of the result of development research. Some of the students of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Information Technology participate in the formula car program. They conceive, design, fabricate by themselves, and compete with small formula-style racing cars at the Formula SAE® (the Society of Automotive Engineers) Competition held annually in USA under the auspices of SAE. This program is planned in order to bring up the ability of settling and solving the problems through teamwork. In addition to the PBL education system, the authors refer to the result of the development research connected with this practical education in this paper.

This study refers to the dynamic stabilities of pitching and rolling of our manufactured Formula SAE vehicle by numerical analysis and dynamic experiments. Formula SAE Competitions are the events of design and manufacture of the Formula SAE vehicles for university students under the auspices of SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers in U.S.A.). This competition consists of static and dynamic events. The abilities for the engineering design, cost and presentation of the students are judged in the static events. The driving reliability and durability of the competition vehicle are judged in the dynamic events. For the higher winning prize at this competition, it is to get high score in not only the static events but also the dynamic events. The competition vehicle is required excellent acceleration performance, turning performance and durability in the dynamic events[1],[2],[3].

The main purpose of Formula SAE Competition (hereafter called “FSAE”, “Formula Society of Automotive Engineering”) is to let students learn the basic ability necessary for engineers through design, fabrication and test projects. Higher running performance of a manufactured vehicle is one of the most important themes that should be studied in Student Formula Japan Competition (hereafter called SFJ Competition). Also, SFJ Competition is the series of the FSAE. the purpose of this study, the chassis must be required light weighting and high stiffness. The former can reduce the centrifugal force and the inertial force in the turning and the latter can contribute to demonstrate the suspension performance according to design [1], [2], [3], [4]. The SFJ Competition has Skid Pad event to compete for steerage responsiveness and high suspension performance on turning. The balance of the highly performed engine and chassis requires to keep high running performance of competition vehicle [5],[6].