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Enriched ventilation and driver assistance systems which plays vital role in human thermal comfort and safety, are now necessities for the whole automotive sector. For faster cabin thermal comfort, air circulation around occupant’s body reveals higher cabin comfort index. In India natural and forced ventilation system is predominantly used in commercial vehicles as an economical solution for achieving interim cabin comfort over air conditioning system. Presently used forced ventilation system consist of electrically driven blower motor to remove stale air around human body which is adding alternator load and thus affects fuel economy. Remarkably, 22% of such auxiliary electrical load is taken by electrical components from engine generated power. In order to enhance cabin thermal comfort and conceivably reduce power usage, an effective air flow control system is need of hour.

Downsizing is one of the crucial activities being performed by every automotive engineering organization. The main aim is to reduce - Weight, CO2 emissions and achieve cost benefit. All this is done without any compromise on performance requirement or rather with optimization of system performance. This paper evaluate one such optimization, where-in radiator assembly with two electric fan is targeted for downsizing for small commercial vehicle application. The present two fan radiator is redesigned with thinner core and use of single fan motor assembly. The performance of the heat exchanger is tested for similar conditions back to back on vehicle and optimized to get the balanced benefit in terms of weight, cooling performance and importantly cost. This all is done without any modification in vehicle interface components except electrical connector for fan. The side members and brackets design is also simplified to achieve maximum weight reduction.

Fuel economy is becoming one of the key parameter as it does not only account for the profitability of commercial vehicle owner but also has impact on environment. Fuel economy gets affected from several parameters of engine such as Peak firing pressure, reduction in parasitic losses, volumetric efficiency and thermal efficiency. Compression ratio is one of key design criteria which affects most of the above mentioned parameters, which not only improve fuel efficiency but also results in improvement of emission levels. This paper evaluates the optimization of Compression ratio and study its effect on Engine performance. The parameters investigated in this paper include combustion bowl volume in Piston and Cylinder head gasket thickness as these are major contributing factors affecting clearance volume and in turn the compression ratio of engine. Based on the calculation results, an optimum Compression Ratio for the engine is selected.

The entire commercial vehicle industry is moving towards weight reduction to leverage on the latest materials available to benefit in payload & fuel efficiency. General practice of weight reduction using high strength steel with reduced thickness in reference to Roark’s formula does not consider the stiffness & dent performance. While this helps to meet the targeted weight reduction keeping the stress levels within the acceptable limit, but with a penalty on stiffness & dent performance. The parameters of stiffener like thickness, section & pitching are very important while considering the Stiffness, bucking & dent performance of a dumper body. The Finite Element Model of subject dumper body has been studied in general particularly on impact of dent performance and is correlated with road load data to provide unique solution to the product. The impact of payload during loading of dumper is the major load case.

Mathematical modeling of any system plays an important role in research and engineering applications. Development of hydropneumatic suspension system requires a complete understanding of physical phenomenon and generating governing equations of the same. In this paper, mathematical model of a typical hydropneumatic suspension system is made and simulation of such a complex multi domain system is programmed in MATLAB Simulink software. Vibration isolation potential of hydropneumatic suspension system is investigated through mathematical modeling, incorporating nonlinearity due to polytropic nature of gas spring.