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Since 1978, the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) of MITI has promoted research and development of “Large-Scale Energy Conservation Technology” popularly known as the “Moonlight Project”. As the first step, “system technology tests” using improved lead acid batteries started at Kansai Electric's Tatsumi Electric Energy Storage System Test Plant on October 1, 1986. The results showed that this system can work not only as a load-leveling apparatus but also as a high-quality power source which can support the utility power system with its load frequency control and voltage regulation capabilities. As the second step of these R&D activities, a 1MW/8MWh sodium-sulfur battery pilot plant was constructed at the same Tatsumi site. On July 11, 1991, 1000 kW× 8H facility, the largest of its type in the world, was completed and started operation. This paper describes the construction experience and operation results of the pilot plant.

General Motors Powertrain Division has developed the next generation big block V8 engine for introduction in the 1996 model year. In addition to meeting tighter emission and on-board diagnostic legislation, this engine evolved to meet both customer requirements and competitive challenges. Starting with the proven dependability of the time tested big block V8, goals were set to substantially increase the power, torque, fuel economy and overall pleaseability of GM's large load capacity gasoline engine. The need for this new engine to meet packaging requirements in many vehicle platforms, both truck and OEM, as well as a requirement for minimal additional heat rejection over the engine being replaced, placed additional constraints on the design.

The optimization of the vaporization and mixture formation process is of great importance for the development of modern gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines, because it influences the subsequent processes of the ignition, combustion and pollutant formation significantly. In consequence, the subject of this work was the development of a measurement technique based on the laser induced exciplex fluorescence (LIF), which allows the two dimensional visualization and quantification of the in-cylinder air/fuel ratio. A tracer concept consisting of benzene and triethylamine dissolved in a non-fluorescent base fuel has been used. The calibration of the equivalence ratio proportional LIF-signal was performed directly inside the engine, at a well known mixture composition, immediately before the direct injection measurements were started.

Engineers need to have a basic understanding of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. This article is designed to serve as an introduction to patents as well as a guide for the technical professional who may or may not have the assistance of corporate legal counsel. Practical approaches to the three common issues that engineers are likely to get involved in: patent searching a product; avoiding patent infringement and protecting a new product idea are covered. Many facts about patents and intellectual property are introduced and a few myths are exposed.

The introduction of real driving emissions cycles and increasingly restrictive emissions regulations force the automotive industry to develop new and more efficient solutions for emission reductions. In particular, the cold start and catalyst heating conditions are crucial for modern cars because is when most of the emissions are produced. One interesting strategy to reduce the time required for catalyst heating is post-oxidation. It consists in operating the engine with a rich in-cylinder mixture and completing the oxidation of fuel inside the exhaust manifold. The result is an increase in temperature and enthalpy of the gases in the exhaust, therefore heating the three-way-catalyst. The following investigation focuses on the implementation of post-oxidation by means of scavenging in a four-cylinder, turbocharged, direct injection spark ignition engine. The investigation is based on detailed measurements that are carried out at the test-bench.

3M is committed to continuously improving products and their manufacture toward the goal of sustainability. The 3M Life Cycle Management (LCM) program has been established to implement this goal. It utilizes a matrix tool to facilitate the review. The matrix consists of LCM Stage (Material Acquisition, R&D Operations, Manufacturing Operations, and Customer Use/Disposal) and Impact (Environment, Health, Safety, and Energy/Resources). The program is coordinated at the staff level by the Corporate Product Responsibility group. The corporate goal is to apply LCM to all new and existing products. The LCM program started with evaluations of new products within business units. Since 3M produces more than 60,000 products manufactured from more than 10,000 different raw materials, the routine evaluation of individual products challenges available staff and business unit resources. A technology-based approach for doing LCMs has been implemented to meet the challenge.

Demands for new features, increasing electrical loads, and improved fuel-economy are driving development of 42V PowerNets in automobiles. Shorter design cycles, increased complexity and a focus on quality are making robust design processes a strategic advantage for competitive manufacturers. Hardware prototypes are both time-consuming and inadequate for the task of verifying performance over a broad range of operating modes, environmental conditions and part-to-part variations. This paper outlines the use of an advanced design-flow, from idea to manufacturing, for vehicle power systems. It starts with the analysis of different topologies down to the subsystem modeling of a power window system. Finally it integrates everything to a Digital Mock-Up (DMU) and analysis of the entire system. Dynamic interactions among the various supplies, converters and loads are examined. System stability and performance are assessed under normal and extreme operating conditions.

The increasing power demand in vehicles has resulted in a need for a higher onboard generation capacity. With the increasing generation requirement, the torque levels of the generator are found to closely converge with that of the starter motor. Hence, integrating the two machines and using a single machine for the two purposes would be technically viable and economically advantageous. This results in a more compact design solution as well. The Integrated Starter/Alternator (ISA) will be integrated directly to the crankshaft of the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and deliver 5 kW average and 12-15 kW peak power at 42V.

Crankshafts of motorcycles require high strength, high reliability and low manufacturing cost. Recently, a reduction of Pb content in the free-cutting steel, which is harmful substance, is required. In order to satisfy such requirements, we started the development of Pb-free free-cutting steel which simultaneously enabled the omission of the normalizing process. For the omission of normalizing process, we adjusted the content of Carbon, Manganese and Nitrogen of the steel. This developed steel can obtain adequate hardness and fine microstructure by air-cooling after forging. Pb-free free-cutting steel was developed based on Calcium-sulfur free-cutting steel. Pb free-cutting steel is excellent in cutting chips frangibility in lathe process. We thought that it was necessary that cutting chips frangibility of developed steel was equal to Pb free-cutting steel. It was found that cutting chips frangibility depend on a non-metallic inclusion's composition, shape and dispersion.

The University of Liege and Breuer Technical Development, Belgium, have designed a parallel hybrid drive train, now implemented in a VW Lupo. The original objectives of the concept were the reduction of total CO2 emissions without performance loss and an acceptable zero-emission range for inner cities. This paper presents: Metropol, a homemade hybrid simulation software, including engine cold start and dynamic battery models, hybrid management strategy for the lowest CO2 emissions, final performance, consumption and emissions of the vehicle.

This paper provides an overview of a strategy for the prediction of noise from industrial gearboxes. A review of the history of predictive noise control in gearboxes is given. The historical lead is followed in developing the strategy, but significant changes in the approach to predictive noise control have been made. The heart of the approach is the dynamic modeling of the gearbox from inside out. Thus one must start this process with the prediction of the internal dynamic response of the gear train system. This paper then details the computational strategy for the determination of the dynamic response of the internal gearbox components. The approaches presented here are significant departures from those carried out in the past.

The traditional method for sampling vehicle exhaust has been the constant volume sampler (CVS) technique as described in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). This method dilutes the entire exhaust output from the vehicle, meters the mixture, and takes a proportional sample for measurement. The Mini-diluter sampling method reverses this process by first metering a small sample and then diluting to a fixed dilution ratio. This approach offers new opportunities to improve the quality of the sample measurement. This is especially interesting considering the lower emissions levels from ULEVs. The usefulness of this idea will depend on the development of stable and repeatable devices to implement it. This paper describes the operation of and presents results from a Mini-dilution system that uses critical flow venturis to provide a stable and repeatable dilution.

Recent cold-room studies have shown that the importance of engine oil viscosity is not in controlling engine cranking speed but in absorbing power from the starting engine. Cranking speed itself appears to be merely an index of engine oil viscosity. It is shown that engines may be successfully started at cranking speeds as low as six rpm if the viscosity of the engine oil is suitably low. On the other hand, if the viscosity of the engine oil is too great the engine may start but will not continue to run even at cranking speeds as high as 125 rpm. These findings are important as they indicate that low-temperature starting cannot necessarily be improved by the simple expedient of increasing the starting system capacity. Rather, good low-temperature oil viscosity is required.

There is a need for sensors that respond to chemical and physical properties of engine oil. In response to this need, an experimental design of an engine-mounted, capacitive sensor has been developed to monitor changes in the dielectric constant of the engine oil. The sensing element is a small, air-gap capacitor that is mounted in a spacer ring that fits between the oil filter and the engine block. Embedded in the same spacer ring is the associated circuitry. Experiments have been carried out with experimental capacitive oil sensors mounted on engines using a typical fully-formulated, factory-fill oil. The oil dielectric constant initially decreases and is less than the starting value while the anti-oxidant additives are active. After about 1600 km, the antioxidant additives become sufficiently depleted to allow oxidation products to accumulate and for the oil dielectric constant to increase at a steady rate of about 1% per 1000 km.

THE object of this paper is to emphasize some of the problems entering into the manufacture, control, and utilization of diesel fuel for mobile and high-speed diesel engines. The importance of ignition quality, as expressed by cetane number, is illustrated for rating the performance characteristics of a fuel. The relationship of cetane number to such engine characteristics as smoke, roughness, carbon deposits, starting, and exhaust odor, is given. The influence of the crude from which the diesel fuel is derived, and the influence of the method and degree of refining on the properties of the finished fuel, are brought out in an attempt to explain the cause for the variation in diesel fuels. The properties of straight-run and cracked fractions of gas oils from several crude sources are given, as well as the properties of several fuels obtained by blending these stocks.

The Coast Guard has a primary duty to administer laws and promulgate and enforce regulations for the promotion of safety of life and property on the high seas and on waters subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The rapid expansion of undersea activity indicates a need for government regulation without waiting for a disaster to provide the impetus. The expected Coast Guard relationship to civil submersible safety is discussed from the standpoint of legislation; preparation, promulgation and enformcement of regulations; duplication of efforts by other organizations; and avoidance of unnecessary interference with use of new developments and technical advancement.

Over the past 30 years, the computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools have been applied extensively in the automotive industry. In order to accelerate time-to-market while coping with legal limits that have become increasingly restrictive over the last decades, CAE has become an indispensable tool covering all major fields in a modern automotive product design process. However, when tackling complex real-life engineering problems, the computational models might become rather involved and thus less efficient. Therefore, the overall trend in the automotive industry is currently heading towards combined approaches, which allow the best of the both worlds, namely the experimental measurement and numerical simulation, to be merged into one integrated scheme. In this paper, the so-called patch transfer function (PTF) approach is adopted to solve coupled vibro-acoustic problems. In the PTF scheme, the interfaces between fluid and structure are discretised in terms of patches.

Martinez and Schlueter [6] described a three-phase model for reconstructing tripped rollover crashes, where the vehicle's path is divided into pre-trip, trip, and post-trip phases. Brach and Brach [9] also described this model and noted that the trajectory segmentation method for the pre-trip phase needed further validation. When a vehicle leaves a measurable yaw mark at the start of its pre-trip phase it might be possible to compare estimates from the three-phase model to those obtained using the critical speed method, and this paper describes Bayesian reconstruction of two such cases. For the first, the 95 percent confidence interval for the case vehicle's initial speed, estimated using the critical speed method, was (64 mph, 81 mph) while the 95 percent confidence interval via the three-phase model was (66 mph, 79 mph).

Multi-dimensional computational efforts using comprehensive and skeletal kinetics have been made to investigate the cool flame region in HCCI combustion. The work was done in parallel to an experimental study that showed the impact of the negative temperature coefficient and the cool flame on the start of combustion using different fuels, which is now the focus of the simulation work. Experiments in a single cylinder CFR research engine with n-butane and a primary reference fuel with an octane number of 70 (PRF 70) were modeled. A comparison of the pressure and heat release traces of the experimental and computational results shows the difficulties in predicting the heat release in the cool flame region. The behavior of the driving radicals for two-stage ignition is studied and is compared to the behavior for a single-ignition from the literature. Model results show that PRF 70 exhibits more pronounced cool flame heat release than n-butane.

The design and performance of a brushless d.c. motor with high power density using ferrite magnets and a two transistor drive is described. The motor utilizes a single-phase operating principle which permits the use of an electronic drive circuit utilizing only two power switching devices, making it cost effective with a conventional d.c. commutator motor using P.W.M. speed control. High power density is obtained by the use of an external rotor construction and a multi-pole format with a concentrated winding. The starting problems normally associated with single-phase motors is addressed and an experimentally proven solution is described. Significant reduction in starting current is achieved as a no cost bonus and significant improvements in overall operating efficiency can be obtained if the power density is reduced to normal auto industry levels.