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In a growing global environment, new products development demands balancing regional requirements and resources in the proposed solutions targeting optimal results. The interaction between Development Centers must pursue, following clearly defined rules, proposals that consider factors from all involved regions. This paper proposes description of important aspects to be considered in Car Suspension Global Product Developments.

Even though the rollover is not the most frequent type of accident, it is of the greatest significance with respect to injury and trauma caused to the vehicle occupants. The need to reduce death incidence and serious injuries has increased the importance of computational simulations and prototype testing. This study presents finite element model to simulate rollover events and to predict possible injuries caused in the head, neck, thorax and cervical spine. Numerical models of a sport utility vehicle (SUV) are simulated including anthropomorphic dummy to represent the driver. The injury risks and traumas are verified to the driver considering belted and unbelted dummies. The computational methodology developed proved to be efficient for the evaluation of the vehicle's roof structure in rollover events.

The purpose of this study is to establish the criteria of election of an electrical architecture tailor-made for the emerging markets, to be applied during the whole vehicle's lifecycle. A literature review about related subjects as the meaning of "electrical architecture," its techniques, criteria and methodologies of development, and the definitions of emerging and developed markets is also presented. Based on the bibliographical research, documentary analysis and unstructured interviews with active members of the automotive industry, the criteria for election of electrical architectures for emerging markets was established, as well as their describers and swing-weights, required by the use of the additive aggregation method - a multi-criteria decision taking method. The criteria were applied in two case studies of automotive industry: the developments of a low-cost hatch vehicle and a mid-size luxury sedan vehicle, both designed for emerging markets.

Vehicular manual transmissions systems often use a vent or breather to allow pressure control inside the main structure. This pressure variation comes along with differences caused by working temperature range. However along with air flow these vents may occasionally allow oil passage noticed by vehicle owner as a transmission leakage event. The more sophisticated the more expensive is the venting device which may contain membranes, labyrinths, baffles and other solutions to avoid leakage. The purpose of this paper is to present a simplified solution to avoid transmission fluid leakage by combining a regular sealing device (fiber concept gasket) and a baffle to avoid oil splash to reach the venting device. The proposed concept took into consideration a quick implementation aspect, low financial impact and less complexity to the overall current system modifying an existing component by adding secondary function instead of creating additional components.

Product Design is a process of creating new product by an organization or business entity for its customer. Being part of a stage in a product life cycle, it is very important that the highest level of effort is being put in the stage. The Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) methodology consists of a collection of tools, needs-gathering, engineering, statistical methods, and best practices that find use in product development. DFSS has the objective of determining the needs of customers and the business, and driving those needs into the product solution so created. In this paper the DFSS methodology is employed to develop the optimal solution to enhance sound transmission loss in a vehicle front of dash pass-through. An integrated approach using acoustic holography and beamforming Noise Source Identification (NSI) techniques is presented as a manner to improve sound insulation during vehicle development.

The automotive competition is growing every day, and automotive products (vehicles and components) are often developed in one country though it's made based on o global architecture, used and applied in other markets, and with the high competition between automakers, engineers can not afford make mistakes during the product development mainly in global architectures. Be the customer or put yourself in the customer's place is the key to good product planning, design, development, and also, marketing, therefore to understand exactly what the customers are complaining about on the current products to consider this lessons learned on the new products the Genchi Genbutsu is key tool to find the root cause of any problem which is the key to a lasting solution and a successful product development. The article describes some successful steps to apply the Genchi Genbutsu during the automotive product development.

In the automotive industries, time and parts production costs are fundamental, mainly in prototyping production. The RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanized) process is an important alternative production to flexible silicone molds when you need to inject polyurethane parts. The objective is time reduction in tooling production and parts. RTV requires notable initial investments in equipments. Many times, this cost does not fit in the automotive third part company's budget. This work shows how is possible to obtain parts by RTV process with excellent quality, without high investments in equipments and without quality loss in produced parts. Lead times and tooling and parts costs are analyzed. Due to equipments low costs, this alternative is accessible not only to automotive industries but also to small and medium suppliers.

Reliability, maintainability/serviceability and security are three qualities of product excellence desired by customers and users of products, however customer expectation for product reliability are continually increasing for almost all product and despite of most of the companies has worked on the philosophy of continuous improvement to meet or exceed the customer's expectations, its difficult to avoid failures or its difficult to ensure zero defect. Once it happens, it generate a customer complaint which is registered by companies. The way that companies used to register the complaints is through their warranty system and also a special database. Most of the companies maintain warranty databases for purposes of financial reporting and warranty expense forecasting. In some cases, there are attempts to extract engineering information from such databases. Another application is to use warranty data to detect potentially serious field reliability problems as early as possible.

Drive a vehicle through corners is a very complex activity, since it means change of movement states. Considering a typical corner, the driver starts in a transient state, changes to a steady state and again changes to transient. Those variations make the vehicle change its behavior due specific suspension and steering characteristics. The idea of this paper is show how only one of those characteristics, the understeer gradient, have influence in the stability perception of the driver. The focus is show how the understeer gradient variation can induce perception of low stability in vehicle when cornering no matter the vehicle still keeps its correct path. This variation means an understeer gradient “acceleration”, the metric human being can perceive, in other words the feeling of stability or its lack of.

Manual steering is largely employed on emergent markets and it demands high level performance to be competitive. To achieve customer satisfaction, it is important to understand physically and be able to quantify what is good performance regarding imperative steering aspects. Nevertheless, global projects and quality management require objective measurements and reference numbers. The strategy defining the measurements in order to compare among development steps and benchmark must be studied carefully. Objective measurements and subjective evaluation correlation is necessary to define the reference data. In this project, several cars were evaluated and measured performing standard maneuvers. The maneuvers were performed to obtain appropriated and enough information to understand the performance and to do the correlation. The subjective evaluation was normalized and; using objective data, parameters were calculated to represent properly and in a robust form the driver fills.

Through computational dynamic simulations is possible to achieve high reliability index in the development of automotive components, thereby enabling the reduction of cost and time of a product development with considerable gain in quality. This work suggests the validation of a methodology for simulation where is possible to improve the confidence level for design flexible components, such Heater and Cooling hoses that are under dynamic engine action, in relation to the physical model. Known the difficulty in predicting non-linear mathematical relationship deformation under effect of forces and moments, was established a study based on experimental measurements where were used as input parameters to simulate the dynamic behavior of flexible components, in this case, coolant hoses.

Nowadays the automotive market is reducing product development time and launching more technological vehicles, always focusing on having even more safety with better customer experience which generates big competitiveness and requires more accurate and faster development, the virtual simulations make it possible to meet this new reality with a high confidence level. This work comprises the validation of a methodology to analyze the design confidence level for flexibles associated with suspension kinematics. To validate the methodology, the scanned physical model was compared with the virtual simulations using the Simcenter 3D Flexible Pipe software. As inputs data for simulation, it is used geometrical, physical, and chemical information. Through the suspension kinematics study was establish possible movement situations to obtain the flexibles deformations attending to all suspension positions.

This paper proposes a methodology for automotive manufacturing lines scheduling. This methodology is based on generalized stochastic Petri Nets and Markov decision processes with imprecise probabilities. The usual generalized stochastic Petri Nets is extended by allowing imprecision about probabilities to be explicitly represented and by human task time graph of different products to be attached. Once the system is modeled using this tool and its extensions, we translate the resulting models into Markov decision processes with imprecise probabilities, in order to compute optimal policies that will result in the line scheduling. This paper introduces an algorithm that performs this translation.

The present work gives an overview of the current situation of failures that may occur in automotive components, showing their distribution in the vehicle and the causes that make them occur, trying to emphasize the different materials which are used in the manufacturing of these components. This work is a technical approach strictly supported by an engineering concept which aims to discuss the different factors which contribute to cause premature failures of automotive components, prior to their utilization in the field or when they are exposed to the most variable conditions of use. One of the most important objectives of this study is to call the attention of design engineers, research engineers and manufacturing people to the importance of the components integrity which shall be taken into primary consideration in the design phase as well as in the specification of the material and process of manufacturing.

The purpose of the theme developed in this work is to increase the volume of information related to vehicle evaluation and how human perception can be translated into numbers, thus facilitating the process of definitions, refinement and analysis of its performance. Based on the discipline of psychophysics, where it is possible to study the relationship between stimulus and sensation and the use of post processing tool known as PSD (Power Spectral Density), post process the acceleration data of inputs perceived by the occupants of the vehicle, when driving in routes considered ergodic. By this, in a summarized way, get to human subjective perception of comfort. This material shows in a conceptual way a sequence of studies that were conducted to make it possible, to generate a performance classification of the subjective vehicle attribute of Smoothness, by processing values of acceleration measured the driver's seat.

Vehicle ergonomics, more specifically driver ergonomics, has been the subject of interest in the automotive industry as a way to provide customers vehicles that have more than modern project, efficiency and competitive price. The driver ergonomics is related to the way the driver interacts with the vehicle interior, particularly, with the seat, hand and foot controls, considering aspects such as ease of access, space, proper upper and lower limb motion and drivers comfort and fatigue. Regarding the lower limbs, the driver’s comfort can be evaluated in terms of joint moments and muscle forces, which are influenced by the hip, knee and ankle joint angles, which in turn depend on the distances between the seat and pedal. Variations in seat to pedal horizontal or vertical distances will result in different angular positions and, consequently, different joint moments and muscle forces, which are associated to greater or lower muscular activations and greater or lower driver’s fatigue.

This work presents aspects related to research and development of high-speed steels for valve seat inserts application. Five series of materials were evaluated: high speed steel M3/2 infiltrated with copper during sintering; high speed steel M3/2 with Cu3P addition; high speed steel M3/2 with Cu3P addition and further copper infiltrated during sintering; high speed steel M3/2 mixed with iron powder; high speed steel M3/2 mixed with iron powder and niobium carbide. The physical and mechanical properties of the evaluated high-speed steels are presented in terms of densification, hardness, and radial mechanical strength. These properties are compared according to the materials processing and heat treatment.

According to several customer perception survey, Squeak and Rattle (S&R) is among the top most annoying defects. Consequently, GMB engineering design, development and validation process must be continuously improved and consistently applied to all platforms to guarantee that all products are free from squeaks and rattles. This paper introduces those concepts and discusses some strategies to eliminate or minimize S&R. Concepts and tests results are commented. Finally, the challenge in detection and analysis of S&R is discussed. Objective and subjective evaluation methodologies are being developed and suppliers training and integration have been improved

This paper explores the method of modeling and validation the computational tools able to accurately replicate the dynamic behavior of a Formula SAE vehicle. Based on limitations in conducting physical tests, it is possible to mathematically predict the forces and momentum generated on the steering column of the vehicle, minimizing effort and improving driver comfort even before the component physically manufactured. The results in permanent state due technical instrumentations were used in the physical vehicles and compared with other proposals (skid Pad test). As the software simulating the same path, it was possible to adopt values of speed and wheel steering, allowing compare the dynamics of the vehicle, through the signals from other sensors installed in the data acquisition system, validating the behavior of the models presented in permanent state. Other aspects were studied to understand vehicle behavior concerning lateral stability and steering behavior.

In the current automotive industry, in an increasingly challenging environment due to strong competition, to develop a product that performs its functions objectively, with quality and mainly with the lowest possible cost, these are the keys to conquer competitive advantage. This paper is intended to explore cost reduction of an automotive system by using the techniques of the methodology EV / AV (Engineering Value / Analysis Value). The analysis are framed as exploratory, in the form of study, with ratings of the components and their functions, followed by the generation of ideas with the completion of an indication of a great potential for a product development with optimized cost.