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In the early stages of vehicle development, it is critical to establish performance goals for the major systems. The fundamental modes of body and chassis frames are typically assessed using FE models that are discretized using shell elements. However, the use of the shell-based FE method is problematic in terms of fast analysis and quick decision-making, especially during the concept phase of a vehicle design because it takes much time and effort for detailed modeling. To overcome this weakness, a one-dimensional (1D) method based on beam elements has been extensively studied over several decades, but it was not successful because of low accuracy for thin-walled beam structures. This investigation proposes a 1D method based on thin-walled beam theory with comparable accuracy to shell models. Most body pillars and chassis frame members are composed of thin-walled beam structures because of the high stiffness-to-mass ratio of thin-walled cross sections.

The recent surge in platforms like YouTube has facilitated greater access to information for consumers, and vehicles are no exception, so consumers are increasingly demanding of the quality of their vehicles. By the way, the door is composed of glass, moldings, and other parts that consumers can touch directly, and because it is a moving part, many quality issues arise. In particular, the door panel is assembled from all of the above-mentioned parts and thereby necessitates a robust structure. Therefore, this study focuses on the structural stiffness of the door inner panel module mounting area because the door module is closely to the glass raising and lowering, which is intrinsically linked to various quality issues.

A crucial component utilized in the trunk space is the luggage board. Positioned at the bottom of the trunk, the trunk board separates the vehicle body from the interior and supports for luggage. The luggage board serves multiple functions, including load-bearing stiffness for luggage, partition structure functionality, noise insulation, and thermal insulation. There is a need for a competitive new luggage board manufacturing method to meet the increasing demand for luggage boards in response to the changing market environment. To address this, the "integrated sandwich molding method" is required. The integrated sandwich molding method utilizes three key methodologies: grouping processes to integrate similar functions, analyzing materials to replace them with suitable alternatives, and overcoming any lacking functionality through integrated design structures. This paper presents a methodology for developing the integrated sandwich molding method.

This research addresses the pressing need for reducing vehicle aerodynamic resistance, with a specific focus on mitigating wheel and tire resistance, which constitutes approximately 25% of the overall vehicle drag. While the prevailing method for reducing resistance in mass production development involves wheel opening reduction, it inadvertently increases wheel weight and has adverse effects on brake cooling performance. To overcome these challenges, novel complementary resistance reduction methods that can be employed in conjunction with an appropriate degree of wheel opening reduction are imperative. In this study, we introduce symmetrical wheels with a fan-like shape as a solution. The fan configuration influences the surrounding flow by either drawing it in or pushing it out, depending on the direction of rotation. Application of these fan-type wheels to a vehicle's wheels results in the redirection of flow inwards or outwards during high-speed driving due to wheel rotation.

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 body stiffness plays a key role in vehicle performance, such as noise and vibration, ride and handling, durability and so on. In particular, a body D-pillar ring structure is the most sensitive affecting the body stiffness on vehicle with tail gate. Therefore, since D-pillar body ring structure for high stiffness and lightweight is required, an optimized design methodology that simultaneously satisfies the requirements was studied. It focused on a methodology that body engineering designers can optimize design parameters easily and quickly by themselves in the preceding stages of vehicle’s styling distribution and design conceptual planning. First, it is important to establish the body stiffness design strategy by predicting the body stiffness with the vehicle’s styling at early design stage. The methodology to predict body stiffness with the styling and body dimension specification parameters was introduced.

Bad weather conditions such as torrential rain, heavy snow, and thick fog frequently occur worldwide. Vehicle accidents in such bad weather conditions account for a significant portion of all vehicle accidents, and the level of damage is relatively severe compared to other accidents that occur in clear weather. This paper analyzes the driver's driving stability in bad weather conditions, which has such a significant meaning, in various ways through experiments on the inconvenience experienced by the driver. In this study, three levels of bad weather conditions were implemented in a driving simulator environment to evaluate driver inconvenience for six activities. Through driving experiment, quantitative bio-signals and vehicle signals were analyzed in each weather condition. The SD survey was used to assess the driver's inconvenience level for activities performed while driving and analyze the ranking of inconvenience.

As the AVN display in the car interior becomes larger and located above the center fascia, the driver's visual visibility is becoming important. In addition, since an expensive touch sensor is installed, a transparent electrode cost reduction technology for a display touch sensor that can replace an indium material, which is an expensive rare metal, is required. In this paper, we developed new transparent electrode materials and manufacturing methods for the touch sensor film which light reflectance is low and flexible without a separate low-reflection multi-layer, so that the design freedom is high and the material cost is low. By optimizing the amount of fluorine doping ratio in tin oxide, excellent electrical conductivity and high optical transmittance are secured, and the surface reflectance is reduced by adjusting the diameter and length of the silver nanowire. As a result, it was shown that the AVN display image and font readability was improved.

Automotive OEMs have introduced a new development paradigm, modular architecture development, to improve diversity quality and production efficiency. It needs solid fundamentals of system-based performance evaluation and development for each system level and single component level. When it comes to NVH development, it is challenging to realize the modular concept because noise and vibration should be transferred through various transfer path consisting of many parts and systems, which interact with each other. It is challenging for a single system of interest to be evaluated independently of the adjacent parts and environments. In this study, a new system-based development process for a vehicle suspension was investigated by applying blocked force theory and FRF-based dynamic substructuring. The objective is to determine the better dynamic stiffness distribution of many bushes installed in a suspension system in the frequency range corresponding to road noise.

As autonomous driving vehicles are developed, automotive makers start focusing on implementing new door types, such as a falcon wing door or a B-pillarless dual sliding door, which could be one of the best-selling points. To make these doors electrically operate, applying advanced sensors like a RADAR or an Ultrasonic sensor is almost mandatory. Without these sensors, the door could be easily damaged or the customers could be seriously injured. Due to physical limitation, however, every sensor has a noise in nearby area and has a specification of the minimum detection range, which causes us not to be able to precisely detect the object in close area. If the controller cannot detect the precise distance of the object, the door could malfunction, since it could misidentify the obstacles. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the minimum detection range by applying a prior estimation scheme.

The power trunk lid system is a device that automatically opens and closes the trunk lid by motor, for the purpose to improve user’s convenience. This technology was applied only to high-end large cars such as Equus and Genesis. But as preference for high convenience features increases, the scope of application is gradually expanding to semi-large and mid-sized cars. Therefore, the necessity of securing profitability through cost reduction was emerged, and it made us to develop the power trunk lid system by spindle drives. Compared to the conventional swing arm drive type, the spindle drive type may achieve cost savings, lightness and easy of assembly by optimizing the required motor specifications. However, since it uses a planetary gear with high gear ratio and the high rotation speed of the motor, operating noise is relatively large.

Local nonlinearities can affect the global dynamics of their linear host structures. In the context of fixed-wing aircraft, failure of store mounting can result in strong local nonlinearities. In this work, we experimentally mimic store mounting failure conditions in a model airplane subject to harmonic excitation. Two identical stores are mounted under the wings and are placed symmetrically opposite each other. The configuration where both stores are “locked”, i.e., mounting is very stiff, serves as the baseline linear system. The second configuration involves unlocking one of the stores, enabling a geometrically nonlinear flexure connection between the unlocked store and the wing. The flexure lets the store interact with the first flexible mode of the airplane, resulting in large relative displacements between the store and wing. In addition, the configuration allows for vibro-impacts between the wing and store.

Body-in-white plays a key role in protecting passengers in the event of collision between vehicles, and also endures external forces during cornering in a vehicle. Stiffness of body-in-white is the basic characteristic of a car body, and it is closely related to the full-vehicle-level performance such as body durability, ride and handling, etc. There have been many attempts to correlate body stiffness to full-vehicle-level performance, and studying the relationship between torsional body stiffness and durability has been the popular topic among others. In general, it is believed to be true that bodies with high torsional stiffness exhibit good durability performance, and in many cases this assumption seems to be verified. However, not all cases are true to this assumption. In this paper, relationship between torsional body stiffness and body durability has been closely studied.

Since the introduction of the DrivAer in 2012 this model has become the standard generic aerodynamic benchmark and aerodynamic research model used by automotive OEMs, software vendors and researchers. In 2017, the relevance of the DrivAer has been furthered by the inclusion of a simplified engine bay. Whilst the DrivAer has become the popular standard, the availability of detailed wind tunnel test data, a key enabler for more sophisticated aerodynamic benchmarking and research, remains limited. This paper presents a comprehensive set of wind tunnel test data of the notchback version of the Ford Open Cooling DrivAer, including aerodynamic force measurements, detailed surface pressure measurements and flow field measurements at 3 cross-sections in the vicinity of the model. In addition, the paper will discuss the sensitivity of the experimental data to wind tunnel repeatability and facility-to-facility variations.

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.

This paper focuses on the optimization of the cross-section of a panel type impact door beam. The key parameters of the cross-section of the beam were artificially changed by using a geometry morphing tool FCM (Fast Concept Modeler), which is plugged in to CATIA. Then, the metamodel of FE (Finite Element) analysis results was created and optimized using LS-OPT. The ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) analysis of results was carried out to find the factor of weight reduction. Finally, a new cross section concept was proposed to overcome the limitation of old structure. The optimization was carried out for the beam with the final cross-section to have 10 % or more reduction in total weight.

Several types of noise exist in automobiles. The flow-induced noise in the expansion device can be very disturbing since the expansion device is located near the occupants. In many studies, the flow-induced noise is found to be mitigated when the orientation of the tube is changed. However, no study explores the reason why flow-induced noise changes when the orientation of the tube is changed. The flow-induced noise varies along with the flow regimes near the expansion devices. In this paper, an experimental based research is used to study how the tube orientation changes the flow regimes under the same operating conditions. A pumped R134a system with transparent tubes (1/4-inch ID) is used to visualize the flow regimes near the manual expansion valve. The transparent tube is a continuous connection of horizontal tubes, 45° inclined tubes, and vertical tubes.

The friction properties related to squeal noise was analyzed with the development histories and simplified computational method. Firstly, the development histories were investigated especially focusing on the case which the friction materials were modified to improve squeal noise occurrence. Based on the histories, the friction properties of selected friction materials were newly measured using dynamometer. The average friction coefficient levels, torque oscillations, the increment of friction coefficient during full-stop, and etc. were compared with the squeal noise occurrence, and the results showed that increase of friction properties cause production of squeal noise. The result suggested that the size of friction energy was important factors related to triggering the squeal noise. Also, the contact conditions between rotor disc and friction materials were significant factors deciding the noise occurrence.

Aerodynamic assessment of icing effects on swept wings is an important component of a larger effort to improve three-dimensional icing simulation capabilities. An understanding of ice-shape geometric fidelity and Reynolds and Mach number effects on iced-wing aerodynamics is needed to guide the development and validation of ice-accretion simulation tools. To this end, wind-tunnel testing was carried out for 8.9% and 13.3% scale semispan wing models based upon the Common Research Model airplane configuration. Various levels of geometric fidelity of an artificial ice shape representing a realistic glaze-ice accretion on a swept wing were investigated. The highest fidelity artificial ice shape reproduced all of the three-dimensional features associated with the glaze ice accretion. The lowest fidelity artificial ice shapes were simple, spanwise-varying horn ice geometries intended to represent the maximum ice thickness on the wing upper surface.