Search Results

To compete with the current market trends there is always a need to arrive at a cost effective and light weight designs. For commercial vehicles, an attempt is made to decrease weight of the current design without compromising its strength & stiffness, considering/bearing all the worst road/engine load cases and severe environmental conditions. The topic was chosen because of interest in higher payloads, lower weight, and higher efficiency. Automotive cylinder head must be lighter in weight, to meet increasingly demanding customer requirements. The design approach for cylinder head has made it difficult to achieve this target. A designer might make some judgment as to where ribs are required to provide stiffness, but this is based on engineering experience and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the stand-alone head.

Crankshaft is one of the critical components of an engine (5C: cylinder head, connecting rod, crankshaft, camshaft and cylinder block). It is subjected to repetitive and dynamic loads due to cyclic operation of an engine and inertia forces. Due to uneven mass distribution, failure zones occur near fillets and holes in journal locations during operation of the engine. Hence, this topic was chosen because of increasing interest in higher payloads, lower weight, higher efficiency and shorter load cycles in crankshaft equipment. Calculation of Crankshaft strength consists initially in determining the nominal alternating bending and nominal alternating torsional stresses, which multiplied by the appropriate SCF (Stress Concentration Factor), result in an equivalent alternating stress. This equivalent alternating stress is then compared with the fatigue strength of the selected crankshaft material. This comparison will show whether or not the crankshaft concerned is dimensioned adequately.

As the commercial vehicle engine heads towards the next generation of stringent emissions and fuel economy targets, all aspects of the internal combustion engine are subject to close scrutiny. Inherently, ICE’s are very inefficient, with efficiency varying between 18 ~ 40%. This efficiency is a function of friction losses, pumping losses and wasted heat. Currently, automotive OEM’s globally are hard at work trying to attack these issues with various solutions to achieve incremental gains. The leading trend is getting more power from less space, also known as downsizing. Due to the importance of downsizing, direct injection and other technologies, it is imperative to highlight another key area, where OEM’s are expanding their limits to gain those extra few kilometers per liter of fuel i.e. weight reduction. From an emissions perspective, it is estimated that every 50 kg of weight reduced from an average 1,500 kg vehicle cuts CO2 emissions by 4 ~ 5 grams.

Manual Gear shifting mechanism is a customer touch point in vehicle driving conditions and it is a frequently used functional part of the vehicle. Inherent challenges exist to develop a gear shifting system that achieves better comfort shifting gears in manual transmissions, i.e. gear shift levers should be comfortable, efficient and reliable. There are several traditional concepts available for designing a mechanical interface for gear shift system like cable GSL (Gear Shift Linkages), mechanical GSL, engine mounted SRGSL (single rod gear shift linkages), directly transmission mounted GSL. All are having pros and cons over another. A unique attempt is made to provide an efficient single rod type gear actuation system for commercial vehicle where one end is directly mounted on the cowl floor of the bus/Truck and another end is connected to transmission lever.

Advanced Non-linear topology optimization methods have been addressed as the most promising techniques for light weight and performance design of Powertrain structures. The theoretical achievements are obtained both mechanically and mathematically. Nowadays, the great challenge lies in solving more complicated engineering design problems with multidisciplinary objectives or complex structural systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a forum to present new developments in structural Non-linear topology optimization. The advantage of the proposed method is that structural optimization on irregular design domains can be carried out easily. Furthermore, this method integrates the stress analysis and the boundary evolution within the framework of finite element methods. In this paper, mainly focused on the Commercial Vehicles Powertrain component i.e. Transmission Housing.