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This paper describes the development of a varying stiffness suspension system to have better control over handling, comfort and structural fatigue of automobiles. Earlier approaches resulted in cumbersome designs and resulted in higher lateral forces on coil springs and structural fatigue. In this work, an initiative has been taken considering all these factors and optimizing the design at every stage of development to achieve lightweight and economical suspension system to meet the objectives. The variable stiffness is achieved through the relative travel of spring with respect to the wheel travel for different configurations. For this purpose, a stepper motor drive is employed to move the hinge point in the angular arch. The developed design is also examined through mathematical modeling and the MBD simulations.

This paper describes the design methodology and algorithm development towards the design of an automatic external gear-shifting and clutch-actuation system for a sequential gearbox with the aim of providing the drivers with easier and an efficient means of shifting gears. Automatically actuated manual transmission system bridges the gap between automatic and manual transmissions which provides the advantages of both type of transmissions. This would ideally leads to faster shifting time and provide significant benefits in the form of electronic-aids like launch control and traction control. Removal of mechanical clutching would reduce fatigue and lead to ergonomic benefit. Based on the benchmarking performed on an easily available ready-to-install aftermarket alternative, options will be considered for the actuating mechanism and the most feasible will be used to develop a shifting system.

With the ever increasing emphasis on vehicle occupant safety, the safety of pedestrians is getting obscured behind the A-pillars that are expanding in order to meet the federal roof crush standards. The serious issue of pillar blind spots poses threats to the pedestrians who easily disappear from driver's field of view. To recognize this blinding danger and design the car around the driver's eye, this paper proposes the implementation of Aluminum Oxynitride marked under name AlON by Surmet Corporation for fabrication of A-pillars that can allow more than 80% visibility through them. AlON is a polycrystalline ceramic with cubic spinel crystal structure and is composed of aluminum, oxygen and nitrogen. With hardness more than 85% than sapphire, its applications range from aerospace to defense purposes which qualify it in terms of strength and thus imply that it can be conveniently used as A-pillars in vehicles. Furthermore, it possesses characteristics of being bonded to metals as well.