Search Results

This project was undertaken with an objective to develop methodology by formulating set of procedures that would help in achieving the end goal. Once methodology is established, it paves way to optimize the end results more effectively which results in reduced lead time during product development. Methodology can either be based on pure experimental investigations or by simulations. Combination of mathematical and empirical approach is inherently followed in simulations, which helps in reducing the testing time and overall cost. Commercial vehicles (CV) have seen paradigm shift in the fuel consumption (FC) certification approaches, with an intention to align with 2016 Paris climate agreement. Use of simulation tool like VECTO for commercial vehicle FC certification has gained momentum in Europe. Overall experience gained in commercial vehicle FC simulation has motivated us to leverage the learnings for off-road applications like agricultural tractors.

The Indian government has been promoting electric vehicles through various policy initiatives, such as offering incentives and subsidies to EV manufacturers and consumers, establishing charging infrastructure across the country, and setting ambitious targets for EV adoption. These measures aim to reduce the dependence on imported fossil fuels, mitigate air pollution, and promote sustainable mobility. As a result, the demand for electric vehicles across India is steadily increasing, and the country is emerging as a lucrative market for EVs globally. An electronically commuted brushless DC (BLDC) motor usually functions for traction in electric two-wheelers. Electric vehicles need to comply with electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) requirements. During the EMC compliance of electric two-wheelers, it is certain that the BLDC motor and its controller play an important role.

The Light commercial vehicle (LCV) is primarily used for the last mile delivery and it hold the volume share of around 61% in the commercial vehicle segment. The last mile delivery services have seen a massive surge after the CoVID 19 pandemic resulting is the increase sale of LCV in last few years and is expected to grow further by 8-11% in the coming years. However, city logistic is also responsible for most pollution and noise in the city. Hence, policymakers are aiming to reduce carbon footprint by promoting the use of Electric vehicle by providing incentive to automakers though schemes like FAME I and FAME II. In order to effectively reduce the carbon footprint within city it is important to increase the use of new electric vehicle and convert the old polluting vehicles to electric. Hence, a retro fitment solution for converting used LCV to electric can help in reducing emission as well as noise pollution. Later the same solution can be offered as OE fitment solution.

Due to the transformation of the automotive industry from conventional vehicles to electric vehicles, new challenges have emerged concerning Electromagnetic Compatibility. Though the Radiated Emission limits in global regulation are the same for both types of powertrains of vehicles, however, due to the phenomena of conversion of high voltage to low voltage, rapid charging/discharging, and different components involved in electric powertrain, the Radiated Emission from electric vehicles give a strikingly different trend which is challenging to combat. When compared with the conventional Spark Ignition vehicle, many other electronic components of the electric vehicle stay in the mode of Power ON while in the “Ignition ON” steady state. This resulted in us observing a significant shift in the amplitude and frequency throughout the frequency band of Radiated Emission measurement.

The low running cost of electric two wheelers is resulting in high popularity and growing market share. The electric two wheelers are generally considered silent. However, the tonal nature of radiated noise is annoying for both driver and pedestrians in electric vehicles. This study focuses on electric two-wheeler with annoyance issue. The customer complained about non-linear noise with respect to speed and also whining during loading and coasting. The detailed Noise Source Identification (NSI) revealed that the noise is due to motor and transmission whine and structural resonances of chassis excited by this motor excitation during runup and gear whine orders during coasting when excitation by motor is absent. The motor mounting and chassis are structurally modified with suitable stiffeners and damping based on the results of modal analysis. The transmission gear geometry and contact pattern are optimized for transmission error reduction.

Battery is one of the safety critical systems in EV. As the number of EVs increases, battery safety becomes an important task to avoid any mishap during its use, as even small accidents may slow down the adaptation of EVs. Automotive environment being one of the harshest operating environments, it is important to ensure both mechanical and electrical safety of the battery pack. Li-Ion batteries are most popular among traction batteries, due to their high energy density, long life, and fast charging capabilities. But mechanical damage, over temperature, short-circuit, etc. may lead to battery thermal runaway, causing a major accident. Mechanical abuse of battery can be one of the reasons that may lead to the damages mentioned above, eventually causing thermal runaway in batteries. That’s why all major battery safety standards have requirements for vibration and mechanical shock tests.

A bus is integral part of public transportation in both rural and urban areas. It is also used for scheduled transport, tourism, and school transport. Buses are the common mode of transport all over the world. The growth in economy, the electrification of public transport, demand in shared transport, etc., is leading to a surge in the demand for buses and accelerating the overall growth of the bus industry. With the increased number of buses, the issue of safety of passengers and the crew assumes special importance. The comfort of driver and passenger in the vehicle involves the vibration performance and therefore, the structural integrity of buses is critically important. Bus safety act depicts the safety and comfort of bus operations, management of safety risks, continuous improvement in bus safety management, public confidence in the safety of bus transport, appropriate stakeholder involvement and the existence of a safety culture among bus service providers.

The Indian automotive industry is striving towards more safe and durable vehicles. A need was felt to study the effect of changes in axle static loads on fatigue life of the axle components. Also, there was a need to develop generic test method, as there are no test standards or generic methods available in public domain for fatigue testing of commercial vehicle axles. The study was carried out to check direct effect of change in axle loads on various connections on axle, effect of suspension configuration and force distribution, Vehicle dynamics, etc. In this paper, an India specific generic load spectra was evaluated for accelerated laboratory validation. Paper discusses the methodology as; study of heavy commercial vehicle systems, road load data collection on identified test vehicles w.r.t. test matrix finalized, India specific test loads and load spectra development, normalization of axle load spectra w.r.t to static axle weights and arriving at test guidelines.

Wheel rims and wheel hub bearings are critical components of Heavy Commercial Vehicle (HCV) suspension systems and are subjected to extensive fatigue loading throughout their operational life. Actual loading conditions on wheels are a combination of radial loads (vertical loads) and cornering loads (lateral loads) acting simultaneously and are directly influenced by payload and road conditions. Currently for Indian usage, there are test guidelines [1] only for separate uniaxial Radial Fatigue Test (RFT) and Cornering Fatigue Test (CFT) for wheel rims which might not represent realistic combined loading conditions, and no generic guidelines are available for testing of wheel hub bearings.

The Construction & Mining field is continuously upgrading, reshaping under the stimulus of technical enhancement. India is considered one of fastest growing country in the word. Requirement for Construction Equipment Vehicles in India is continuously growing due increased rate infrastructure development. To promote development of the Construction Equipment Vehicles (CEV’s) manufacturing sector it was also necessary to build a new governance architecture. Every vehicle plying on road has to comply with Central Motor Vehicle Regulatory requirements as per CMVR act 1989. Earlier 2021 CEV’s were required to go through performance trials like brake, steering effort, turning circle measurement, speedometer calibration as dynamic tests as per regulations.

With the recent development in virtual modelling and vehicle simulation technology, many OEM’s worldwide are using digital road profiles in virtual environment for vehicle durability load prediction and virtual design evaluation. For precise simulation results, it is important to have the tire digital twin which is the realistic representation of tire in the virtual environment. The study comprises of discussion about different types of tire models such as empirical, solid model, rigid ring model and flexural ring models such as Pacejka, MF Swift, CD tire, F tire etc. and also the complexity involved in development of these tire models. Generation of virtual tire model requires highly sophisticated test rigs as well as vehicle level testing with Wheel Force transducers and other vehicle dynamics sensors. The large number of data points generated with testing are converted in standard TYDEX format to be further processed in various software tool for virtual model generation.

The Indian market for battery-powered electric vehicles (xEV) is growing exponentially in the coming years, fueled by tumbling lithium-ion battery prices and favorable government policies. Lithium-ion battery is leading in clean mobility ecosystem for electric vehicles. LiBs efficient and safe performance for tropical climatic conditions is one of the primary requirements for xEV to succeed in India. The performance of LiBs, however, is impacted due to ambient temperature as well as the heat generated within cell due to the load cycle electrochemical reaction. The acceptable operating temperature region for LiBs normally is between 20 °C to 45 °C and anything outside of this region will lead to degradation of performance and irreversible damages. Therefore, understanding the thermal behavior is very crucial for an efficient battery thermal management.

Ride is considered to be one of the crucial criterion for evaluating the performance of a vehicle. Automobile industry is striving for improvement in designs to provide superior passenger comfort in Commercial vehicles segment. In Industry, Quarter-car model has been used for years to study the vehicle’s ride dynamics. But due to lower DOF involved in quarter car, the output accuracy is somewhat compromised. This paper aims in development of a 7 DOF full-car Model to perform the ride- comfort analysis for Light Duty 4*2 Commercial Bus using MATLAB Simulink which can be used to tune the suspension design to meet the required ride-comfort criteria. Firstly, experimental data and Physical Parameters are collected by performing Practical Test on commercial Bus on different road profiles. Secondly, a Full Car Mathematical Model with 7 DOF has been developed for a bus using MATLAB Simulink R2018a.

Last decade has been era of environmental awareness. Various programs have launched for making devices and appliances eco-friendly. This initiative has lead automobile industry toward hybridization and now total electrification of vehicles. As electric motor is being added to automobile as a prime mover, due to high frequency vibrations along with higher torque electric motor needs to be isolated properly & carefully as this vibration can damage other automobile parts. Dynamic response of electric motor is different from response of IC engines, so use of engine mounting design method may not be suitable for designing mounting system for electric motor. First, both 4- point and 3- point mounting system are considered for analytical and experimental investigation of force and displacement transmissibility. Position and orientation of elastomeric mounts plays important role in design of mounting system for electric motor.

In present scenario, tyre industry is more focused on providing maximum extent of NVH comfort to passengers by improvising the tyre design. Noise contribution from the tyres is classified in to three regions, viz., structure-borne (tyre vibrations), air-borne (tread pattern) and cavity noise (air cavity). In general, a Finite Element (FE) model of tyre provides an inherent advantage of analyzing tyre dynamic behavior. In this paper, an attempt was made to develop a three-dimensional FE tyre model and validate the same through experimental approach. The CAD Model of the tyre was generated through 3D image scanning process. Material property extraction of tyre was carried out by Universal Testing Machine (UTM) to generate Finite Element (FE) model. For validation of tyre FE model, Experimental Modal Analysis (EMA) and Noise Transfer Function (NTF) were conducted.

To enhance the crashworthiness of electric vehicles, designing the optimized and safer battery pack is very essential. The deformed battery cell can result in catastrophic events like thermal runaway and thus it becomes crucial to study the mechanical response of battery cell. The goal of the research is to experimentally investigate the effect of mechanical deformation on Lithium-ion battery cell. The paper thoroughly studies the phenomenon of short circuiting at the time of failure. Various experiments are carried on 18650 cylindrical cells (NCA chemistry) under custom designed fume hood. The setup captures the failure modes of battery cell. The loading conditions have been designed considering the very possible physical conditions during crash event. The study has been done for radial compression, semicircular indentation, hemispherical indentation, flat circular indentation and case of three-point bending.

The Electric Vehicles (EV) or Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) has a bunch of electrical/electronic components and its operation give rise to complicated EMI/EMC issues. The Power Electronics Module (PEM), comprising of DC-DC convertor/invertor and Battery Management Unit (BMU), is driving the motor to propel the vehicle. “Battery Pack Module” powers these units through cables. The fast switching of these circuit elements present in the system leads to noise propagation through the cables. These noise signals give rise to various Electromagnetic (EM) related issues in the cable harness of vehicle. It is essential that these cables should not interfere with other electronic components and also does not get effected by external EM disturbances.

Design of real time active controls for structural dynamics problems requires a very precise mathematical model, to closely determine the system dynamic behavior, under virtual simulation. The finite element models can somehow be used as a mathematical model but due to complex shape/structure of the component, the size of discrete models resulting from finite element analysis is usually very large, causing the virtual simulation to be extremely computationally intensive and time consuming, also the boundary conditions applied are not very scalable, making the system deviate from its real dynamic behavior. Thus, this paper deals with the design of a Model Order Reduction technique, using orthogonal decomposition of system matrices, which can be used for creating accurate low-order dynamic model with scalable boundary conditions.

Electric Vehicles (EVs), with its inherent advantage of zero tailpipe emissions, are gaining importance because of aggressive push from government not only to reduce air pollution but also to reduce dependency of fossil fuel. EVs and necessary charging infrastructure along with ‘connected’ technology is redefining mobility. Considering the fast growing EV market, it becomes important for an EV Powertrain Architect to design and develop a powertrain solution having low engineering efforts and satisfying business, market and regulatory requirements at a competitive price. This paper presents a compact, flexible, convenient and smart featured simulation tool for an EV Powertrain Architect for estimating the specifications of key powertrain components such as traction battery and electric motor. The proposed tool takes into consideration the end-user as well as the regulatory requirements of range, maximum speed, acceleration and gradeability.

An excellent physical and mechanical property makes Aluminium (Al) alloy suitable alternative lightweight materials against steel and cast iron in automotive components. ICME is a computational tool, which integrates the materials information to engineering product performance analysis. MatCalc is ICME tool, which follows the chain rule of process, microstructure, property and performance relationship in materials development. This paper reports the development of Al 6061-T6 propeller shaft through forging process and the materials and process model of the Al yoke is simulated using MatCalc simulation software. Finite element analysis method is used for designing of Al 6061-T6 propeller shaft. The forged Al yoke is solutionized at temperature 550°C for 1 hr followed by artificial ageing at temperature 180°C for 16 hrs to improve the hardness and strength of the yoke.