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It is well understood that using lower viscosity engine oils can greatly improve fuel economy [1, 2, 3, 4]. However, it has been impossible to evaluate ultra-low viscosity engine oils (SAE 0W-12 and below) utilizing existing fuel economy test methods. As such, there is no specification for ultra-low viscosity gasoline engine oils [5]. We therefore developed firing and motored fuel economy test methods for ultra-low viscosity oils using engines from Japanese automakers [6, 7, 8]. This was done under the auspices of the JASO Next Generation Engine Oil Task Force (“TF” below), which consists mainly of Japanese automakers and entities working in the petroleum industry. Moreover, the TF used these test methods to develop the JASO GLV-1 specification for next-generation ultra-low viscosity automotive gasoline engine oils such as SAE 0W-8 and 0W-12. In developing the JASO GLV-1 specification, Japanese fuel economy tests and the ILSAC engine tests for evaluating engine reliability were used.

The new lubricant was newly developed for differential gear unit to contribute to all friction factors/conditions (Boundary, Hydrodynamic & those Mixed Lubrication) even if the differential gear is operating under very severe conditions such as high-gear-contact pressure and highly sliding speed. The main concept of development was selecting and formulating the optimized additives for severe lubrication conditions in order to achieve the best balance between thinner-film thickness and extreme pressure performance. In conclusion, by the application of both synthetic base oil instead of mineral one and activation technology of MoDTC in spite of ZnDTP free formulation, it is finally realized to reduce the torque of final drive unit by 40% and it can be estimated the 0.5% of CO2 reduction in actual vehicles.

There are many production robots used at car manufacturing plants, and each of them is fitted with several reducers. A breakdown of one of these reducers may cause a huge loss due to the stoppage of all production lines. Therefore, condition-based maintenance is currently being used to predict failures by predetermined thresholds for average and standard deviations. However, this method can cause many false alarms or some false negatives. There are some ways of suppressing false alarms, such as detecting a change in the probability density function. However, when false alarms are suppressed using the probability density function in the operational range, some false negatives may occur, leading to a breakdown of a reducer and huge loss. A false negative is caused by overlooking an anomaly with slight changes and it is difficult to detect using only the probability density function.

The present paper is Part 1 of two consecutive studies. Part 1 describes three subjects: definition of the equivalent temperature (teq), measurements of teq using a clothed thermal manikin in a vehicle cabin, and modeling of the clothed thermal manikin for teq simulation. After defining teq, a method for measuring teq with a clothed thermal manikin was examined. Two techniques were proposed in this study: the definition of “the total heat transfer coefficient between the skin surface and the environment in a standard environment (hcal)” based on the thermal insulation of clothing (Icl), and a method of measuring Icl in consideration of the area factor (fcl), which indicates the ratio of the clothing surface to the manikin surface area. Then, teq was measured in an actual vehicle cabin by the proposed method under two conditions: a summer cooling condition with solar radiation and a winter heating condition without solar radiation.

Wheels play an important role in determining the aerodynamic drag of passenger vehicles. This is because the contribution of wheels to aerodynamic drag comes from not only the wheels themselves, but also from the interference effect between wheel wakes and the base wake. As far as the authors are aware, there have been no reports about aerodynamic drag sensitivity to wheel shape factors for different vehicle types and different exterior body shapes. The purpose of this study was to clarify CD sensitivity to wheel shape factors for a sedan and an SUV, including different rear fender shapes. Many different wheel configurations were investigated in terms of the CD, base pressure and flow fields in wind tunnel tests. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to clarify CD sensitivity to each wheel shape factor based on the test data. This study revealed high CD sensitivity factors for both the sedan and SUV.

An electric vehicle (EV) has less powertrain energy loss than an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICE), so its aerodynamic accounts have a larger portion of drag contribution of the total energy loss. This means that EV aerodynamic performance has a larger impact on the all-electric range (AER). Therefore, the target set for the aerodynamics development for a new EV hatchback was to improving AER for the customer’s benefit. To achieve lower aerodynamic drag than the previous model’s good aerodynamic performance, an ideal airflow wake structure was initially defined for the new EV hatchback that has a flat underbody with no exhaust system. Several important parameters were specified and proper numerical values for the ideal airflow were defined for them. As a result, the new EV hatchback achieves a 4% reduction in drag coefficient (CD) from the previous model.

In open-grille vehicle aerodynamics simulation using computational fluid dynamics, in addition to basic flow characteristics, such as turbulent flow with a Reynolds number of several million on the bluff body, it is important to accurately estimate the cooling air flow introduced from the front opening. It is therefore necessary to reproduce the detailed geometry of the entire vehicle including the engine bay as precisely as possible. However, there is a problem of generating a good-quality calculation grid with a small workload. It usually takes several days to a week for the pretreatment process to make the geometry data ‘clean’ or ‘watertight’. The authors proposed a computational method for complex geometries with a hierarchical Cartesian grid and a topology-independent immersed boundary method with dummy cells that discretize the geometry on a cell-by-cell basis and can set an imaginary point arbitrarily.

This paper describes a study of drag reduction devices for production pick-up trucks with a body-on-frame structure using full-scale wind tunnel testing and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. First, the flow structure around a pick-up truck was investigated and studied, focusing in particular on the flow structure between the cabin and tailgate. It was found that the flow structure around the tailgate was closely related to aerodynamic drag. A low drag flow structure was found by flow analysis, and the separation angle at the roof end was identified as being important to achieve the flow structure. While proceeding with the development of a new production model, a technical issue of the flow structure involving sensitivity to the vehicle velocity was identified in connection with optimization of the roof end shape. (1)A tailgate spoiler was examined for solving this issue.

Reducing vehicle fuel consumption has become one of the most important issues in recent years in connection with environmental concerns such as global warming. Therefore, in the vehicle development process, attention has been focused on reducing aerodynamic drag as a way of improving fuel economy. When considering environmental issues, the development of vehicle aerodynamics must take into account real-world driving conditions. A crosswind is one of the representative conditions. It is well known that drag changes in a crosswind compared with a condition without a crosswind, and that the change depends on the vehicle shape. It is generally considered that the influence of a crosswind is relatively small since drag accounts for a small proportion of the total running resistance. However, for electric vehicles, the energy loss of the drive train is smaller than that of an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.

Road Noise is generated by the change of random displacement input inside the tire contact patch. Since the existing 3 or 6 directional electromagnetic shakers have a flat surface at the tire contact patch, these shakers cannot excite the vehicle in a manner representative of actual on-road road noise input. Therefore, this paper proposes a new experimental method to measure the road noise vehicle transfer function. This method is based on the reciprocity between the tire contact patch and the driver's ear location. The reaction force sensor of the tire contact patch is newly developed for the reciprocal loud speaker excitation at the passenger ear location. In addition, with this equipment, it is possible to extract the dominant structural mode shapes creating high sound pressure in the automotive interior acoustic field. This method is referred to as experimental structure mode participation to the noise of the acoustic field in the vibro-acoustic coupling analysis.

To improve the fuel economy via high EGR, combustion stability is enhanced through the addition of hydrogen, with its high flame-speed in air-fuel mixture. So, in order to realize on-board hydrogen production we developed a fuel reformer which produces hydrogen rich gas. One of the main issues of the reformer engine is the effects of reformate gas components on combustion performance. To clarify the effect of reformate gas contents on combustion stability, chemical kinetic simulations and single-cylinder engine test, in which hydrogen, CO, methane and simulated gas were added to intake air, were executed. And it is confirmed that hydrogen additive rate is dominant on high EGR combustion. The other issue to realize the fuel reformer was the catalyst deterioration. Catalyst reforming and exposure test were carried out to understand the influence of actual exhaust gas on the catalyst performance.

It is considered that door mirror drag is composed of not only profile drag but also interference drag that is generated by the mixing of airflow streamlines between door mirrors and vehicle body. However, the generation mechanism of interference drag remained unexplained, so elucidating mechanism for countermeasures reducing drag have been needed. In this study, the prediction formulas for door mirror drag expressed by functions in relation to velocities around the vehicle body were derived and verified by wind tunnel test. The predicted values calculated by formulas were compared with the measured values and an excellent agreement was found. In summary, new prediction formulas made it possible to examine low drag mirror including profile and interference drag.

The adoption of the electronic controlled steering systems with new technologies has been extended in recent years. They have interactions with other complex vehicle subsystems and it is a hard task for the vehicle developer to find the best solution from huge number of the combination of parameter settings with track tests. In order to improve the efficiency of the steering system development, the authors had developed a steering bench test method for steering system using a Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS). In the steering HILS system, vehicle dynamics simulation and the tie rod axial force calculation are required at the same time in the real-time simulation environment. The accuracy of the tie rod axial force calculation is one of the key factors to reproduce the vehicle driving condition. But the calculation cannot be realized by a commercial software for the vehicle dynamics simulation.

HEV and EV markets are in a rapid expansion tendency. Development of low-cost regenerative cooperation brake system is needed in order to respond to the consumers needs for HEV and EV. Regenerative cooperation brake system which HEV and EV are generally equipped with has stroke simulator. We developed simple composition brake system based on the conventional ESC unit without the stroke simulator, and our system realized a low-cost regenerative cooperation brake. The key technologies are the quiet pressurization control which can be used in the service application, which is to make brake force depending on brake travel, by gear pump and the master cylinder with idle stroke to realize regenerative cooperation brake. Thanks to the key technologies, both the high regenerative efficiency and the good service brake feeling were achieved.

This paper describes a control method to improve straight-line stability without sacrificing natural steering feel, utilizing a newly developed steering system controlling the steering force and the wheel angle independently. It cancels drifting by a road cant and suppresses the yaw angle induced by road surface irregularities or a side wind. Therefore drivers can keep the car straight with such a little steering input adjustment, thus reducing the driver's workload greatly. In this control method, a camera mounted behind the windshield recognizes the forward lane and calculate the discrepancy between the vehicle direction and the driving lane. This method has been applied to the test car, and the reduction of the driver's workload was confirmed. This paper presents an outline of the method and describes its advantages.

This paper reports about a trial for miniaturization of an air-cooled inverter integrated with motor, which is realized by reduction of the total volume of smoothing capacitor. An integrated system prototype was constructed with a disk-shaped inverter positioned at the rear end of the motor. We examined the possibility of using a ceramic capacitor, which features a higher heat-resistance temperature, lower internal resistance and higher capacity density than a film capacitor. At the same level of capacitance, the volume of a ceramic capacitor is less than one-half that of a film capacitor, enabling the size of the smoothing capacitor to be reduced to approximately one-fifth that of the currently used device. A suitable circuit configuration and physical layout of distributed smoothing capacitors and corresponding power device modules are proposed and demonstrated.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) have both developed crash test methodologies to address frontal collisions in which the vehicle's primary front structure is either partially engaged or not engaged at all. IIHS addresses Small Overlap crashes, cases in which the vehicle's primary front energy absorbing structure is not engaged, using a rigid static barrier with an overlap of 25% of the vehicle's width at an impact angle of 0°. The Institute's Moderate Overlap partially engages the vehicle's primary front energy absorbing structure using a deformable static barrier with 40% overlap at a 0° impact angle. The NHTSA has developed two research test methods which use a common moving deformable barrier impacting the vehicle with 20% overlap at a 7° impact angle and 35% overlap at a 15° impact angle respectively.

This paper deals with a vehicle detection method for realizing a blind spot warning function, under various environmental conditions. We introduced a method that is capable of discriminating the target object vehicles, under poor lighting conditions and in cases where the lens may be exposed to splashes in wet, snow and dirt roads. The image sensing of the vehicle detection consists of four functional components: obstacle detection, velocity estimation, vertical edge detection, and final classification. Such componets allow robust performances resembling geometry based approaches, with low calculation power as an apperance based approach. This paper describes the functional components, and furthermore methods to enhance the performances under low contrast conditions and also suppress false detections caused by residue on the lens, which becomes essential for installation on vehicles driven in actual road conditions.

An active vision system equipped with a high-speed pulsed light-emitting projector and a high-speed image sensor is proposed and applied to lane marker detection in this paper. The proposed system has the capability to suppress image information obtained from the background light and provides only the image information from the signal light emitted by the projector. This is accomplished by synchronizing image capture with the time of signal light emission. To reduce the power consumption and cost of the system, a relatively low intensity projector is used as the light source. The background illuminance on a bright day can be much higher than that of the signal. To improve the signal-to-background ratio, the signal light is modulated using a pulse width modulation technique. Then, the image is captured using a high-speed camera operating in synchronization with the time the signal light is emitted.

The energy crisis and rising gas price in the 2000s led to a growing popularity of hybrid vehicles. Hyundai-Kia Motors has been challenging to develop the new efficient eco-technology since introducing the mild type compact hybrid electric vehicle for domestic fleet in 2004 to meet the needs of the increasing automotive-related environmental issues. Now Hyundai has recently debuted a full HEV for global market, Sonata Hybrid. This system is cost effective solution and developed with the main purpose of improving fuel consumption and providing fun to drive. Presenter Seok Joon Kim, Hyundai Motor Company