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The rapid growth of electronic feature content within the vehicle continues to challenge the automotive industry. Customers want cutting edge consumer electronics features in a vehicle before the features are obsolete. However, automotive manufacturers continue to struggle with introducing new features into vehicles before they become obsolete to the customer. The ability for automotive manufacturers to seamlessly upgrade existing products with new and improved products continues to plague the automotive industry. Vehicles traditionally take 4 plus years to design and manufacture. Automotive manufacturers need to plan consumer electronics features early, but not actually integrate those into the vehicle until late in the design cycle, possibly on the production line. This would help facilitate providing the most recent features.

Establishing data adjustments that will give an interference free result for bluff bodies in automotive wind tunnels has been pursued for at least the last 45 years. Recently, the Two-Measurement correction method that yields a wake distortion adjustment for open jet wind tunnels has shown promise of being able to adjust for many of the effects of non-ideal static pressure gradients on bluff automotive bodies. Utilization of this adjustment has shown that a consistent drag results when the vehicle is subjected to the various gradients generated in open jet wind tunnels. What has been lacking is whether this consistent result is independent of the other tunnel interference effects. The studies presented here are intended to fill that gap on the performance of the two-measurement technique. The subject CFD studies are designed to eliminate all wind tunnel interference effects except for the variation of the (linear) static pressure gradient.

The majority of vehicle AC system warranty costs are a result of compressor replacement caused by excessive wear and seizure-related failures. In today's environment, compressor manufacturers can control manufacturing process well and maintain a stable product quality. Thus, compressor durability heavily relies on a durable AC system design. Both vehicle compressor suppliers have a variety of procedures and test methods to evaluate AC system and compressor durability. Often times, we still see very different compressor warranty return rates (one higher, the other lower) for the same compressor from the same production line in similar vehicle AC systems. In many cases, both AC systems passed vehicle and component durability tests. In addition, compressor manufacturing process quality was controlled well. The question remains why is there such different compressor warranty return rates?

Automotive industry's migration to usage of HSS (High Strength Steels), AHSS (Advance High Strength Steels) from conventional steels for their low weight and high strength properties has had its significant effects on die wear. The unpredictability of die wear can pose manufacturing issues, for example, undesirable tool life. Hence die wear has been gaining immense attention and lot of research work has been carried out to provide a die wear prediction method. This paper focuses on the method of estimating wear mathematically based on the mechanics behind die wear phenomenon. This is also an effort to study wear on die for an automotive component in critical areas for which the amount of wear are calculated. This study is further to be correlated with production data from die maintenance record, explicit measurement of die wear, etc., to validate the estimation.

The rapid growth of vehicle feature content continues to challenge automotive designers. The total vehicle feature content seriously impacts the manufacturing complexity of any single vehicle. Traditional strategies for introducing new features into high-content luxury vehicles before moving the feature into economy vehicles have been undermined by the fast moving consumer electronics field. The challenge for automotive OEM and Tier 1 suppliers is to optimize the vehicle architecture in order to provide more efficient means of introducing features expediently and efficiently. Therefore, any production vehicle's Electrical, Electronic, & Software (EES) architecture must successfully support modular sourcing, modular assembly, global manufacturing schemes, cost and weight issues.

This paper describes a comprehensive methodology for the simulation of vehicle body panel buckling in an electrophoretic coat (electro-coat or e-coat) and/or paint oven environment. The simulation couples computational heat transfer analysis and structural analysis. Heat transfer analysis is used to predict temperature distribution throughout a vehicle body in curing ovens. The vehicle body temperature profile from the heat transfer analysis is applied as an input for a structural analysis to predict buckling. This study is focused on the radiant section of the curing ovens. The radiant section of the oven has the largest temperature gradients within the body structure. This methodology couples a fully transient thermal analysis to simulate the structure through the electro-coat and paint curing environments with a structural, buckling analysis.

Over the past decades, automotive air-conditioning systems have been undergoing constant improvements to achieve higher efficiency and also for addressing environmental concerns. Long used in home refrigerators, a liquid-line-suction-line heat exchanger (LLSLHX), also termed internal heat exchanger (IHX), has not been given much attention for use in automotive A/C applications. In this work, we applied the IHX as a drop-in component (without changing other components in an existing system) to a production vehicle in order to improve the performance of R134a A/C systems (both CCOT and TXV). We also discussed issues relating to vehicle A/C system performance enhancement with the application of an IHX.