Search Results

Clemson University has recently partnered with the State of South Carolina, BMW, Michelin, Timken, and other partner companies to create new MS and PhD programs in Automotive Engineering. These academic programs are housed in a new 90,000 square foot facility located at the newly created Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) in Greenville, SC. This paper describes a unique course, Automotive Development Processes, developed as a part of the Automotive Engineering curriculum by the authors, Dr. Julian Weber, Manager in BMW Electric/Electronics and Driver Environment development in Munich, Germany, and Dr. John Ziegert, a member of the Automotive Engineering Faculty at Clemson University. Due to geographic and time constraints for Dr. Weber, the course is offered as a 2 week intensive course during the university’s Maymester term.

This paper discusses a compliant link suspension concept developed for use on a high performance automobile. This suspension uses compliant or flexible members to integrate energy storage and kinematic guidance functions. The goal of the design was to achieve similar elasto-kinematic performance compared to a benchmark OEM suspension, while employing fewer components and having reduced mass and complexity, and potentially providing packaging advantages. The proposed suspension system replaces a control arm in the existing suspension with a ternary supported compliant link that stores energy in bending during suspension vertical motion. The design was refined iteratively by using a computational model to simulate the elasto-kinematic performance as the dimensions and attachment point locations of the compliant link were varied, until the predicted performance closely matched the performance of the benchmark suspension.

This paper describes a computational approach to investigating spoke vibrations in cast polyurethane spoked wheels during high-speed rolling. It focuses on four aspects: 1) Creating a two-dimensional finite element model of a cast polyurethane rolling wheel which is in contact with a rigid plane to observe the spoke vibrations. 2) Investigating the effect of rolling speed on the observed spoke vibrations. 3) Investigating the effect of spoke thickness on spoke vibration frequencies. 4) Creating a three-dimensional spoke model to investigate spoke vibrations which exhibit both symmetric and anti-symmetric out-of-plane modes.