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Finite element (FE) based simulations for fully trimmed bodies are a key tool in the automotive industry to predict and understand the Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) behavior of a complete car. While structural and acoustic transfer functions are nowadays straight-forward to obtain from such models, the comprehensive understanding of the intrinsic behavior of the complete car is more complex to achieve, in particular when it comes to the contribution of each sub-part to the global response. This paper proposes a complete target cascading process, which first assesses which sub-part of the car is the most contributing to the interior noise, then decomposes the total structure-borne acoustic transfer function into several intermediate transfer functions, allowing to better understand the effect of local design changes.

This paper presents the novel active vibration control (AVC) system that controls vehicle body vibration to reduce the structural borne road noise. As a result of vehicle noise testing in an electric vehicle, the predominant frequency of vehicle body vibration that worsens interior noise is in the range of 150-250Hz. Such vibration in that frequency range, commonly masked in engine vibrations, are hard to neglect for electric vehicles. The vibration source of that frequency is the resonance of tire cavity mode. Resonator or absorption material has been applied inside the tire for the control of cavity noise as a passive method. They require an increment of weight and cost. Therefore, a novel method is necessary. The vibration amplified by resonance of cavity mode is transferred to the vehicle body throughout the suspension system. To reduce the vibration, AVC system is applied to the suspension mount.

With the trend of electrification and connectivity, more electrified parts and more integrated chips are being applied. Consequently, potential problems based on electro-magnetic could occur more easily, and interest on EMC performance has been rising according to the degree of electrification. In this paper, one of the most severe systems, cooling fan motor in terms of EMI, is analyzed and improvement methods are suggested for each type of cooling fan. Additionally, an optimized configuration of improvement method for EMC has been derived through analysis and study. Finally, verification and validation are implemented at the system and vehicle levels.

Recently, regulations on automobile emission have been significantly strengthened to address climate change. The automobile industry is responding to these regulations by developing electric vehicles that use batteries and fuel-cells. Automobile emissions are environmentally harmful, especially in the case of vehicles equipped with high-temperature and high-pressure diesel engines using compression-ignition, the proportion of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions reaches as high as 85%. Additionally, air pollution caused by particulate matter (PM) is six to ten times higher compared to gasoline engines. Therefore, the electrification of commercial vehicles using diesel engines could potentially yield even greater environmental benefits. For commercial vehicles battery electric vehicles (BEVs) require a large number of batteries to secure a long driving range, which reduces their maximum payload capacity.

The existing FCEV have been developed with only a few vehicle models. With the diversification of both passenger and commercial FCEV lineups, as well as the increasing demand for vehicle trailer towing, there is a growing need for high-capacity fuel cell stacks to be applied in vehicles. However, at the current level, there are limitations and issues that arise, such as insufficient power output and reduced driving speed. As a results, the importance of thermal energy management has been increasing along with the increase in required power. Traditional cooling performance enhancement methods have mainly focused on developing increased hardware specifications, but even this approach has reached its limitation due to package, cost and weight problem. Therefore, it is essential to develop a new cooling system to solve the increases in heat dissipation.

Recently, the environmental temperature of vehicles is changing due to the electrification of vehicles and improved internal combustion engine system to reduce carbon emissions. However, mechanical properties of plastic materials change very sensitively to environmental temperature changes, and mechanical properties decrease when exposed to high temperatures. Therefore, it is important to estimate lifespan estimation of plastic parts according to temperature changes. In this paper, reliability analysis process to estimate the maximum service temperature of plastic parts was developed using aging data of material properties, environmental condition data of automotive parts, and field driving condition data. Changes in the mechanical properties of plastic materials such as glass fiber reinforced polyamide materials were tested. The environmental exposure temperature of the vehicle and parts was measured, and the general driving pattern of the vehicle was analyzed.

Engine off control is conducted on parallel hybrid vehicles in order to reduce fuel consumption. It is efficient in terms of fuel economy, however, noise and vibration is generated on engine cranking and transferred through engine mount on every mode transition from EV to HEV. Engine crank position control has been studied in this paper in order to reduce vibration generated when next cranking starts. System modeling of an architecture composed of an engine, P1 and P2 motors has been conducted. According to the prior studies, there exists correlation between crank vibration level and the crank angle. Thus a method to locate pistons on a specific crank angle which results in a local minimum of vibration magnitude could be considered. The P1 motor facilitates this crank position control when engine turns off, for its location directly mounted on a crankshaft allows the system model to obtain more precise crank position estimation and improved linearity in torque control as well.

To improve the fuel efficiency and satisfy the strict emission regulations, the development of internal combustion engine gets more complicated in both hardware and software perspectives, and the margins for durability and NVH quality become narrower, which could result in poor NVH robustness in harsh engine operating conditions. In this paper, we investigate experimentally the camshaft impact noise mechanism relating the valve train and timing chain forces to detailed motion of the camshaft and the chain tensioner. After the initial investigation of identifying the impact timings and specific engine operating points when the noise occurs, the camshaft orbital motion inside of the sliding bearing is measured and visualized with the proximity sensors with calibration after sensor mounting, in addition to the chain tensioner movements.

Lithium-ion battery has advantages of high energy density and cost effectiveness than other types of batteries. However due to the low mechanical stability, their performance is strongly influenced by environmental conditions. Especially, external pressure on a cell surface is a crucial factor because an appropriate force can improve battery cycle life, but excessive force may cause structural failure. In addition, battery pack is composed of various components so that uncertainties in dimension and material properties of each component can cause a wide variance in initial pressure. Therefore, it is important to optimize structural design of battery pack to ensure initial pressure in an effective range. In this paper, target stiffness of module structure was determined based on cell level cycle life test, then structural design has been optimized for weight reduction. Cell cycling tests were performed under different stiffness conditions and analyzed with regression model.

The shift towards electric vehicles is gaining pace to address carbon neutrality and environmental concerns. New technologies are being developed to cater to the unique features of EVs, such as the low indoor noise at low speeds, which require a low-noise ventilation system. A new dual-blower type system was developed to solve the problem of seat-bottom package caused by battery placement in the vehicle. This system uses two blowers, one for the cushion and one for the back, and reduces RPM to lower high-frequency noise. A new solution was introduced for temperature drop performance in the ventilation system. An integrated controller was also developed to control the seat warmer and ventilation system, with a smart control function added to respond to vehicle speed and ventilation time based on customer usage. As a result, this new ventilation system improves air volume, reduces noise, improves foot space, and reduces the number of parts compared to the previous system.

In order to align with net-zero CO2 ambitions, automotive OEMs have been developing increasingly sophisticated strategies to minimise the impact that combustion engines have on the environment. Intelligent thermal management systems to actively control coolant flow around the engine have a positive impact on friction generated in the power cylinder by improving the warmup rate of cylinder liners and heads. This increase in temperature results in an improved frictional performance and cycle averaged fuel consumption, but also increases the piston to liner clearances due to rapid warm up of the upper part of the cylinder head. These increased clearances can introduce piston slap noise and substantially degrade the NVH quality to unacceptable levels, particularly during warmup after soak at low ambient temperatures. Using analytical techniques, it is possible to model the thermo-structural and NVH response of the power cylinder with different warm up strategies.

Generally, the HVAC system of a vehicle is composed of Blower unit assembly and Heater unit assembly, and is located on the driver’s side of the dash panel. However, electric vehicles have far fewer parts than conventional internal combustion engine vehicles, so electric vehicles have large space in the engine room. This allows HVAC, which occupies large volume in the interior side, to be pushed in the direction of the engine room altogether, or by placing a part inside the engine room to make a slim cockpit and expand the interior space. However, this new structure, called the Split HVAC System, is mounted through the dash, allowing noise to pass through relatively easily. Since this adversely affects the NVH of an electric vehicle, it needs to be developed in terms of noise transmission. Therefore, in this paper, a study was conducted to predict the sound transmission loss of Split HVAC through an analytical method.

In this paper, an application process is studied at which the insertion loss (IL) test data of sound insulating parts or noise control treatments are utilized for the sound transmission loss (STL) simulation of the trimmed dash structure. The considered sound barrier assemblies were composed of a felt layer, a mass layer, and a decoupler layer. Flat samples of sound barrier assemblies with several different thicknesses were prepared, and ILs of them were measured by using a sound transmission loss facility. Flat samples were assumed to have mass-spring-mass resonance frequencies. The mass was set as the area mass of the sound barrier layer of the felt layer and the mass layer. The spring constant of the decoupler layer was assumed as the multiplication of that of an air spring and a spring correction factor.

As global emission standards are becoming more stringent, it is necessary to increase thermal efficiency through the high compression ratio in spark-ignited engines. Various studies are being conducted to mitigate knocking caused by an increased compression ratio, which requires an understanding of the combustion phenomena inside the combustion chamber. In particular, the in-cylinder flow is a major factor affecting the entire combustion process from the generation to the propagation of flames. In the field of spark-ignited engine research, where interest in the concept of lean combustion and the expansion of the EGR supply is increasing, flow analysis is essential to ensure a rapid flame propagation speed and stable combustion process. In this study, the flow around the spark plug was measured by the Laser Doppler Velocimetry system, and the correlation with combustion in spark-ignited engines was analyzed.

The windshield is an integral part of almost every modern passenger car. Combined with current developments in the automotive industry such as electrification and the integration of lightweight material systems, the reduction of interior noise caused by stochastic and transient wind excitation is deemed to be an increasing challenge for future NVH measures. Active control systems have proven to be a viable alternative compared to traditional passive NVH measures in different areas. However, for windshield actuation there are neither comparative studies nor actually established actuation concepts available to the automotive industry. This paper illustrates a comparative conceptual study on windshield actuation for the active control of wind noise in a passenger car. Making use of an experimental modal analysis of the windshield installed in a medium-sized vehicle, a reduced order numerical simulation model is derived.

The woofer in a car should be large to cover the low frequencies, so it is heavy and needs an ample space to be installed in a passenger car. The geometry of the woofer should conform to the limited available space and layout in general. In many cases, the passengers feel that the low-frequency contents are not satisfactory although the speaker specification covers the low frequencies. In this work, a thin panel is installed between the roof liner and the roof panel, and it is used as the woofer. The vibration field is controlled by many small actuators to create the speaker and baffle zones to avoid the sound distortion due to the modal interaction. The generation of speaker and baffle zones follows the inverse vibro-acoustic rendering technique. In the actual implementation, a thin acrylic plate of 0.53x0.2 m2 is used as the radiator panel, and the control actuator array is composed of 16 moving-coil actuators.

Environmental and fuel economy regulations (Eu 6d and WLTP RDE) on automobiles have been tightened recently. To counter this regulation, the global automobile industry is focusing on weight reduction, fuel efficient turbo charger, cooled EGR, thermal management, low friction and so on. However, the high-speed turbocharger makes turbulence, and resulting in airflow noise. This noise is transmitted indoor through the air intake system, which adversely affects the vehicle's competitiveness. Therefore, for turbo engine, it is essential to reduce the noise of the air intake system. The air intake system consists of air cleaner, air filter, air intake hose and air duct. The air flow noise of turbo-engine is mainly the emission noise emitted from the walls of air intake system. And the transfer path of turbo noise is in order of air intake hose, air cleaner and air duct. Therefore, it is effective to reduce the noise of the air intake hose located at the beginning of noise transfer path.

Recently, the design of automotive headlamps has become diversified and complicated according to customer needs. Hence, structural complexity of the headlamps has also increased. Complex structure of the headlamps inevitably causes a disturbance in air circulation. For this reason, inadvertent micro-sized water droplets, called fogging, are condensed on the inner surface of headlamp lens due to temperature difference between the inner and outer lens surfaces. To circumvent fogging inside of the headlamp lens, an anti-fogging coating is indispensable. Conventionally, diverse surfactants have been adopted as substantial material for the anti-fogging coating. However, the usage of the surfactants causes undesirable side effect such as water mark arising from vapor condensation, which is an important issue that must be fully resolved. In this study, we developed an innovative anti-fogging coating material without using conventional surfactant.

This model based investigation is carried out in order to control the half order modulation for diesel engines using by virtual calibration approach and proposes a feedback control strategy to mitigate cylinder to cylinder imbalance from asymmetric cylinders torque production. Combustion heat release analysis is performed on test data to understand the root cause of observed cylinder to cylinder pressure variations. The injected fuel variations are shown to cause the observed pressure variations between cylinders. A feedback control strategy based on measured crank shaft position is devised to control the half order modulation to balance the combustion pressure profile between cylinders. This control strategy is implemented in Simulink and is tested in closed-loop with the diesel engine model in AMESim. The closed-loop performance indicates that the half order modulation is considerably improved while having minimal impact on the fuel consumption.

Tuning the size and position of the cooling water holes in the head gasket during engine cooling system development is generally positioned at the final stage of the cooling system hardware design. Until now, the gasket hole tuning operation was dependent on the case study through repetitive CFD analysis. In this process, there was a difference in the optimization level by know-how and expertise of the person in charge. In this study, a gasket hole tuning technique was developed using optimization algorithms to improve the level of optimization. First, select factors and perform screening using the DOE(Design Of Experiments) method, and then find the optimal gasket hole size and arrangement through the optimal design process based on the results of the CFD analysis planned by DOE.