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In the engine management systems field, there is lack of sensors locally built and available for sale in Brazil. Therefore, many auto parts companies have to import them affecting directly the final products costs (technology know-how/development costs, import taxes and other material handling/custom related costs). This paper was motivated to study an alternative for a simple, cheaper and locally made throttle position sensor. The choose of this part was because the fact that it is one of the most expensive in the throttle body bill of. For developing this new alternative, it was used a tool called value analysis and value engineering. The outcome of this study was a throttle position sensor function integrated to the throttle body manufacturing line with the advantages that 100% components can be locally purchased, improved robustness against humidity and component quantity reduction by 40%. Therefore achieving more value added.

The penetration of rainwater through the heating ventilation and air conditioning system (HVAC) of a vehicle directly affects the provision of thermal comfort within the vehicle passenger compartment. Present vehicle designs restrict considerably the air-management processes due to reduced space and tighter packaging. The motivation for the study is to get an insight into factors affecting the water ingress phenomenon when a stationary vehicle is subjected to water loading such as heavy rain when parked or waiting in a traffic light or when in a car wash. The test programme made use of a compact closed circuit full-scale automotive climatic wind tunnel that is able to simulate wind, rain and road inclination. The tunnel was developed as part of the collaborative research between the Flow Diagnostics Laboratory (FDL) of the University of Nottingham and Visteon Climate Control Systems [1].

For the past decade or so, automotive entertainment subsystem architectures have consisted of a simple Human Machine Interface (HMI), AM-FM tuner, a tape deck, an amplifier and a set of speakers. Over time, as customer demand for more entertainment features increased, automotive entertainment integrators made room for new features by allowing for the vertical integration of analog audio and adding a digital control. The new digital control came to entertainment subsystems via a low-speed multiplexing scheme embedded into the entertainment subsystem components, allowing remote control of these new features. New features were typically incorporated into the entertainment subsystem by independently packaging functional modules. Examples of these modules are cellular telephone, Compact Disc Jockey (CDJ), rear-seat entertainment, Satellite Digital Audio Radio System (S-DARS) receiver, voice and navigation with its associated display and hardware.

Fuel Vapor Storage Systems (FVSS) on automobiles are susceptible to particle contamination. This is especially true for FVSS components mounted under the automobiles (undercarriage, chassis frame, etc.) and required to meet stringent EPA standards. Particle contamination significantly increases system restriction and reduces the effectiveness of FVSS. This paper describes a dust separator/filter developed to protect the FVSS. Accelerated field durability evaluations and measurement techniques were developed to identify clean locations, ingested contamination levels and ingested contaminant size distributions. Based on field evaluations, test methods were developed in the lab to evaluate effectiveness of several devices to control and reduce contamination. The dust separator design developed was a combination of baffle separators in series with an open cell foam filter. The dust separator was designed to meet and exceed several vehicle system design requirements.