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In the racing world, speed is everything, and the Formula Student cars are no different. As one of the key means to improve the speed of the car, lightweight plays an important role in the racing world. The weight reduction of unsprung metal parts can not only improve the driving speed, but also effectively optimize the dynamic of the car, so the lightweight design of unsprung parts has attracted much attention. In the traditional Formula Student racing car, the hub and spoke are two independent parts, they are fixed by four hub bolts or a central locking nut, the material of these fasteners is usually steel, so it brings a lot of weight burden. In order to achieve unsprung lightweight, a new type of wheel part design of Formula Student racing car is proposed in this paper. The hub and spoke are designed as integrated aluminum alloy parts, effectively eliminating the mass of hub bolts or central locking nuts.

As an off-road racing car, driving conditions for a Baja racing car are particularly complex. Extreme working conditions such as deep pits and rocky roads have put higher demand on structural strength and frame safety. To solve this problem, extreme working conditions are first studied to check the safety of the steel tube frame of Baja racing cars. Secondly, based on Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) to explore the frame's characteristics, analyze the frame's six-order mode, make the corresponding optimization, and solve the resonance problem caused by engine excitation and other factors. Finally, the natural frequency of the frame is measured to verify the effectiveness of the NVH characteristic optimization results, and it is found that the experimental results match the theoretical values. The theoretical analysis results are mainly based on ANSYS software's static and modal analysis.

This paper addresses the brake pad particle emission during the braking process of a vehicle in motion. The frictional-constant contact between the disc brake and pads results in an increased temperature and wear of the pads. The emission of brake pad particles into the atmosphere leads to an increase in air pollution and hence becomes hazardous to the human body. In this paper, a wheel brake disc is installed in a ventilation system where the specific air flow is introduced in order to investigate the thermal performance and the emission of particles from the brake pads. A mathematical model using the fundamental parameters of the brake disc and ventilation system is established. The behavior of the heat transfer is studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The particle emission rate from the pads is calculated under the assumption of uniform constant pressure distribution at the contact surface of the brake disc and pad.

Radiative cooling uses the cold space source to cool the object. The radiative cooling film prepared based on the principle can reduce the fuel consumption of automobile air conditioning refrigeration. In this paper, according to the passive radiative cooling principle, taking SiO2 as the radiative cooling film of infrared radiation material, the theoretical cooling value of the passenger compartment of the automobile is calculated and analyzed based on the heat balance equation. The influence of radiative cooling film on the temperature field of passenger cabins was studied by finite element analysis. The results show that the cooling film made of SiO2 as passive radiation material has an apparent cooling effect on the passenger cabins. At the ambient temperature of 35.15°C, the theoretical cooling temperature is 6.7K. When the radiative cooling film is applied to automobiles, the cooling value of the passenger cabin body, seat, instrument panel, and other parts reaches 2.2K-5.1K.

The lightweight design of a vehicle can save manufacturing costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For the off-road vehicle and truck, the chassis frame is the most important load-bearing assembly of the separate frame construction vehicle. The frame is one of the most assemblies with great potential to be lightweight optimized. However, most of the vehicle components are mounted on the frame, such as the engine, transmission, suspension, steering system, radiator, and vehicle body. Therefore, boundaries and constraints should be taken into consideration during the optimal process. The finite element (FE) model is widely used to simulate and assess the frame performance. The performance of the frame is determined by the design parameters. As one of the largest components of the vehicle, it has a lot of parameters. To improve the optimum efficiency, sensitivity analysis is used to narrow the range of the variables.

With the rapidly developing automotive industry and stricter environmental protection laws and regulations, lightweight materials, advanced manufacturing processes and structural optimization methods are widely used in body design. Therefore, in order to evaluate and improve the pedestrian protection during a collision, this paper presents an impact simulation modeling and structural optimization method for a sport utility vehicle engine hood made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP). Head injury criterion (HIC) was used to evaluate the performance of the hood in this regard. The inner panel and the outer panel of CFRP hood were discretized by shell elements in LS_DYNA. The Mat54-55 card was used to define the mechanical properties of the CFRP hood. In order to reduce the computational costs, just the parts contacted with the hood were modeled. The simulations were done in the prescribed 30 impact points.

The anti-roll bar is an important structural component of the automobile, which can effectively prevent the automobile from rolling and improve the safety of the automobile during steering. In the design of the current anti-roll bar, the stiffness is determined by empirical or oversimplified mathematical models, often not reaching the optimal value. In this paper, eight parameters are used to determine the structure of the anti-roll bar. Combining the Deformation Energy theorem and Castigliano’s theorem, a mathematical model of the stiffness is established. The optimal solution and corresponding parameter values of the mathematical model are obtained by nonlinear programming and genetic algorithm. The influence of structural parameters on the anti-roll bar stiffness is analyzed, and the regular pattern of design is obtained. In addition, the finite element method is used to verify the stiffness solution model.

According to the resonant pavement crusher's work principle, its front frame mounted with the resonance system must meet the needs of the structural requirements. To satisfy the strength and stiffness requirement and avoid the resonance, the natural frequency of the front frame should be designed away from the crusher's working frequency. In this paper, the author builds a finite element model of the front frame and analyses its modal. According to the modal analysis results, the fourth modal frequency is close to the working frequency of the crusher. So the front frame should be optimized. In the finite element model, the front frame has been divided into a number of components of shell elements. Through optimal Latin hypercube experimental design, the author analyses the different component thickness's relationship of the frequencies of the front frame. The components with higher correlation coefficient have been chosen as the variables of optimization.

A key problem of designing a light off-road vehicle with separate frame construction is to improve its torsional characteristic, which has a significant influence on the performance of the vehicle. Inevitably, a certain distortion of the body would be produced by the vibration and impact passing from the road. In present research, an analysis model of light off-road vehicle is established based on the theories and methods of finite element (FEM). The static stiffness of the body is simulated and the deformation of openings on the body, mainly the windows and the doors of the vehicle is studied. On the working conditions of torsion and braking combination, torsion and cornering combination, diagonal dangling, ultimate torsion of unilateral wheels and diagonal wheels, the static strength of separate frame construction is studied as well. The stress concentration regions are obtained according to the results of simulation.

Air disc brake (ADB) is the execution unit of automobile brake, which plays a vital role in traffic safety. Lever is a very important driving as well as stress part of ADB. However, seldom periodical or thesis has given specifications about the lever. In this paper, working principle of the lever is illustrated in detail. Finite element analysis (FEA) of the lever is conducted and some structural problems of the lever are found out. Finally, for the condition that the lever doesn't meet the strength requirement, topography optimization is introduced to improve the shape of lever. Simulation results show that the strength of the lever improved obviously with the optimization, and analysis method as well as optimization method in this paper is feasible.

In order to predict the thermal fatigue life of the internal combustion engine exhaust manifold effectively, it was necessary to accurately obtain the unsteady heat transfer process between hot streams and exhaust manifold all the time. This paper began with the establishment of unsteady coupled heat transfer model by using serial coupling method of CFD and FEA numerical simulations, then the bidirectional thermal coupling analysis between fluid and structure was realized, as a result, the difficulty that the transient thermal boundary conditions were applied to the solid boundary was solved. What's more, the specific coupling mode, the physical quantities delivery method on the coupling interface and the surface mesh match were studied. On this basis, the differences between strong coupling method and portioned treatment for solving steady thermal stress numerical analysis were compared, and a more convenient and rapid method for solving static thermal stress was found.

The brake performance is one of the most important performances in the automotive active safety, and it is the main measure of automotive active safety. Thus, to develop a platform for the braking system is quite significant. Based on the object-oriented technology, the platform for braking system is developed by making use of Visual C++ 6.0 development tool. By using the VC++ development tool and doing secondary development on other softwares, the software possesses powerful features, such as brake plan selection, performance calculation, parametric modeling, finite element analysis and kinematics simulation, etc. An initial brake system can be designed, calculated and analyzed all in one. The living instance shows that the platform has friendly user interfaces, powerful functions and it can improve the precision and efficiency of brake design. The platform has been of great applied value and can also positively promote the design automation of vehicle's braking system.

Hydraulic retarder is one of main auxiliary braking devices of the vehicle. When the vehicle is braking, a great pressure from high-speed fluid is received by hydraulic retarder blades. It is difficult to predict rational hydraulic retarder strength, owing to the complexity of the internal flow of oil. An optimal calculation way of hydraulic retarder strength is proposed based on CFD and FEA, concluding a reasonable result. The 3-D model of hydraulic retarder is built in the general CAD software. The model of fluid passage is extracted, according to the condition when the whole flow passage is filled with oil, and imported to CFD software. The inner flow field of hydraulic retarder is analyzed and the hydraulic surface pressure distribution of the hydraulic retarder blade is obtained at the highest rotary speed of turbine wheel.