Search Results

A main challenge when developing next generation architectures for automated driving ECUs is to guarantee reliable functionality. Today’s fail safe systems will not be able to handle electronic failures due to the missing “mechanical” fallback or the intervening driver. This means, fail operational based on redundancy is an essential part for improving the functional safety, especially in safety-related braking and steering systems. The 2-out-of-2 Diagnostic Fail Safe (2oo2DFS) system is a promising approach to realize redundancy with manageable costs. In this contribution, we evaluate the reliability of this concept for a symmetric and an asymmetric Electronic Power Steering (EPS) ECU. For this, we use a Markov chain model as a typical method for analyzing the reliability and Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) in majority redundancy approaches. As a basis, the failure rates of the used components and the microcontroller are considered.

In ride comfort as well as driving dynamics, the behavior of the vehicle is affected by several subsystems and their properties. When analyzing the suspension, especially the characteristics of the main spring and damper but also rubber bushings are of main importance. Still, the properties of the different components are dependent on the present operating conditions. Concerning rubber bushings, several effects have already been investigated, e.g. dependencies of the transfer function of frequency, amplitude or load history. In this context influences of changes in temperature are often neglected. However, in the following research, the focus specifically lies on determination and analysis of the temperature dependency of rubber bushings. For this purpose, initially the relationship between properties of pure rubber and rubber bushings is described, which serves as a basis for correlating respective temperature dependencies.

Today, body vibration energy of passenger cars gets dissipated by linear working shock absorbers. A new approach substitutes the damper of a passenger car by a cardanic gimbaled flywheel mass. The constructive design leads to a rotary damper in which the vertical movement of the wheel carrier leads to revolution of the rotational axis of the flywheel. In this arrangement, the occurring precession moments are used to control damping moments and to store vibrational energy. Different damper characteristics are achieved by different induced precession. From almost zero torque output to high torque output, this damper has a huge spread. Next to the basic principal, in this paper an integration in the chassis, including a constructive proposal is shown. A conflict with high torque and high angular velocity leads to a special design. Moreover concepts to deal with all vehicle situations like yawing, rolling and pitching are shown.

The increased pressure for power, space, and cost reduction in automotive applications together with the availability of high performance, automotive qualified multicore microcontrollers has lead to the ability to engineer Domain Controller ECUs that can host several separate applications in parallel. The standard automotive constraints however still apply, such as use of AUTOSAR operating system, support for legacy code, hosting OEM supplied code and the ability to determine warranty issues and responsibilities between a group of Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors who all provide Intellectual Property to the final production ECU. Requirements for safety relevant applications add even more complexity, which in most current approaches demand a reconfiguration of all basic software layers and a major effort to redesign parts of the application code to enable co-existence on the same hardware platform. This paper outlines the conflicting requirements of hosting multiple applications.

Multicore processor are well established in classical and tablet personal computers for some year. Such processors use more then one central core for computation and allow to integrate more computational power with smaller costs. However more than 90% of all processors worldwide are not placed in classical IT but are empedded in bigger systems like in modern vehicles or airplanes. Such systems face a very high demand in terms of safety, security an reliability which hinders the use of multicores in such systems. The funded project ARAMiS faces these demands and has the goal to enable the usability of multicore systems in the domains automotive and avionics, as well as later also railway. ARAMiS is the basis for higher traffic safety, traffic efficiency and comfort.

The anti-lock braking system (ABS) is a widespread driver assistance system which allows a short braking distance while simultaneously maintaining the stability and steerability of the car. Vehicles with electric single-wheel drive offer many possibilities of improving the energy efficiency and the braking performance during ABS braking. In this paper, two different ways of including the electric machines in the ABS are analyzed in detail: the damping of torsional drive train vibrations in combination with recuperation and the dynamic split of the braking torque, where the hydraulic braking torque is kept constant and the dynamic modulation of the braking torque is performed by the electric machines. The damping algorithm is developed on the basis of a linearized model of the drive train and the tire-road contact by using state feedback and pole placement methods. Simulation results with a detailed multi-body system show the effectiveness of the control algorithms.

ISO 26262 is the actual standard for Functional Safety of automotive E/E (Electric/Electronic) systems. One of the challenges in the application of the standard is the distribution of safety related activities among the participants in the supply chain. In this paper, the concept of a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) development will be analyzed showing its current problematic aspects and difficulties in implementing such an approach in a concrete typical automotive development flow with different participants (e.g. from OEM, tier 1 to semiconductor supplier) in the supply chain. The discussed aspects focus on the functional safety requirements of generic hardware and software development across the supply chain where the final integration of the developed element is not known at design time and therefore an assumption based mechanism shall be used.

With the introduction of the ISO26262 automotive safety standard there is a burden of proof to show that the processing elements in embedded microcontroller hardware are capable of supporting a certain diagnostic coverage level, depending on the required Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL). The current mechanisms used to provide actual metrics of the Built-in Self Tests (BIST) and Lock Step comparators use Register Transfer Level (RTL) simulations of the internal processing elements which force faults into individual nodes of the design and collect diagnostic coverage results. Although this mechanism is robust, it can only be performed by semiconductor suppliers and is costly. This paper describes a new solution whereby the microcontroller is synthesized into a large Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with a test controller on the outside.

Cooling drag is the increase in the total drag due to the internal flow in the cooling system. Because of the high flow resistance in the heat exchanger the momentum of the fluid needed for engine cooling usually is dissipated nearly completely. The resulting drag penalty can be approximated by the so called ram drag. For ground vehicles the cooling drag is typically lower than this approximation due to positive interference of the cooling flow with the general flow around the vehicle. Different mechanisms for the positive interference have been described in the literature. Inlet interference as well as outlet interference can result in significant reduction of the share of the cooling drag. Positive outlet interference is obtained, when the remaining kinetic energy of the cooling flow contributes significant thrust to the overall momentum balance.

The ever increasing use of electronics in modern vehicles has not stopped at comfort systems such as power seats and power windows. Every conventional system that requires operating force will eventually be replaced by a self-powered version. One such item is the electromechanical parking brake of the new Audi A8, offering a host of new features. Despite the many options for new functions, it is nevertheless important to keep the driver in mind. Being engineers, one tends to overlook that not all customers share our excitement for gadgets and overly complicated technical features.

Optimization of ride comfort is becoming increasingly important in chassis development. Constantly rising traffic density and comfort-orientated customer preferences are mainly responsible for this. Comfort and its improvement are important, not only on bad road surfaces, but also on even surfaces. The complexity of analysis leads to a strong link between car testing and simulation. The testing itself is divided in to roadtests and test stands. It is of outstanding importance to analyze the vehicles vibrational behavior from road tests as it is a real life situation. In order to get meaningful results from the roadtest the vehicle has to be seen as a complete vibrational system. The vibrational behavior of a system is clearly defined by input and output of the system. Road tests are chosen in relation to the predicted car. The roads surface is the input of the system exciting the vibrational subsystems of a car. The ride tests are used for the evaluation of drive response behavior.