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High-strength aluminum alloys such as 7075 can be formed using advanced manufacturing methods such as hot stamping. Hot stamping utilizes an elevated temperature blank and the high pressure stamping contact of the forming die to simultaneously quench and form the sheet. However, changes in the thermal history induced by hot stamping may increase this alloy’s stress corrosion cracking (SCC) susceptibility, a common corrosion concern of 7000 series alloys. This work applied the breaking load method for SCC evaluation of hot stamped AA7075-T6 B-pillar panels that had been artificially aged by two different artificial aging practices (one-step and two-step). The breaking load strength of the specimens provided quantitative data that was used to compare the effects of tensile load, duration, alloy, and heat treatment on SCC behavior.

This paper starts describing the in-mold grain lamination and bilaminated film cover when applied to instrument panels with seamless passenger air bag doors. It then offers a comparison between two different PAB door weakening processes, the laser scoring and the scoring by milling. It further discuss the scoring by milling process and analyses its implementation on a real case instrument panel. In the implementation case, the scoring pattern is checked against a pre-defined engineering specification and correlated to the results of a drop tower test, which shows the force necessary to break the PAB door. Three iterations are performed until the results for scoring pattern and breaking force are achieved. The breaking force results are then statistically validated against the specification and capability analysis.

In order to quantify the dynamic restraint capability of a passenger airbag, a sub-system test method has been developed. The sub-system included a passenger airbag, an adjustable generic instrument panel (IP) and an adjustable windshield. The test was called the Passenger Air Bag Linear Impactor Test (PABLIT). This test method could be used for not only A to B comparisons, but also to evaluate the performance of any PAB module design in general, including performance variability of airbag systems. A variety of impactor, pendulum and drop tower test methods are currently used by inflatable restraint suppliers. PABLIT was aimed to standardize airbag testing and data analysis. Various production hardware designs were tested to investigate the characteristics of the sub-assemblies that provide restraint capability.

The International Lubricant Standardization and Approval Committee (ILSAC) ATF subcommittee members have compared the two oxidation bench test methods, Aluminum Beaker Oxidation Test (ABOT) and Indiana Stirring Oxidation Stability Test (ISOT), using a number of factory-fill and service-fill ATFs obtained in Japan and in the US. In many cases, the ATFs were more severely oxidized after the ABOT procedure than after the same duration of the ISOT procedure. The relative severity of these two tests was influenced by the composition of the ATFs. The bench test oxidation data were compared with the transmission and the vehicle oxidation test data.

Piston wetting can be isolated from the other sources of HC emissions from DISI engines by operating the engine predominantly on a gaseous fuel and using an injector probe to impact a small amount of liquid fuel on the piston top. This results in a marked increase in HC emissions. In a previous study, we used a variety of pure liquid hydrocarbon fuels to examine the influence of fuel volatility and structure on the HC emissions due to piston wetting. It was shown that the HC emissions correspond to the Leidenfrost effect: fuels with very low boiling points yield high HCs and those with a boiling point near or above the piston temperature produce much lower HCs. All of these prior tests of fuel effects were performed at a single operating condition: the Ford World Wide Mapping Point (WWMP). In the present study, the effects of load and engine speed are examined.

Several million pounds of S/MA glass reinforced resin has been successfully recovered from manufacturing offal and reject foamed / covered Instrument Panels (IP's) over the past ten years. ACI-WIPAG and Visteon recovered high quality S/MA resin, prepared blends with virgin resin and injection-molded IP substrates meeting OEM specifications. This “S/MA Resin Reclaim” process has been an economical and environmental success; minimized landfill volume, reduced landfill disposal costs, recovered a valuable resource, increased material utilization and reduced raw material costs. This paper reports on a new system and process to recover S/MA glass reinforced resin from manufacturing trim offal and reject IP's, blending and supplying OEM specification resin blends for molding instrument panel substrates. The system demonstrated economical recovery of an excellent quality “Reclaim” resin, blend consistency and uniformity for injection molding instrument panel substrates.

The history behind Polymer Class “A” Body Panels for automotive applications is very interesting. The driving factors behind these applications have not changed significantly over the past sixty years. Foremost among these factors is the need for corrosion and dent resistance. Beginning with Saturn in 1990, interest in polymer body panels grew and continues to grow up to the present day, with every new global application. Today, consumers and economic factors drive the industry trend towards plastic body panels. These include increased customization and fuel economy on the consumer side. Economic factors such as lower unit build quantities, reduced vehicle mass, investment cost, and tooling lead times influence material choice for industry. The highest possible performance, and fuel economy, at the lowest price have always been a goal.

Residual stresses in metals are caused by a number of processes such as inhomogeneous deformation, phase changes and temperature gradients. This investigation focuses on the residual stresses caused by plastic deformation of automotive metals. Such stresses are responsible for part springback and shape distortion in many manufacturing and assembly processes. Tensile residual stresses may lead to stress cracking and, in some alloys, to stress corrosion cracking which may ultimately lead to premature product failure. The residual stress potential of metals can be evaluated by using the Split Ring Test Method. The test can be used to evaluate the effect of materials on residual stresses in cup drawing. Drawn cups are used because they produce large amounts of residual stresses and, therefore, increase measurement accuracy and reduce experimental error. A closed form analytical solution is used to estimate residual stresses in split rings taken from sections cut from the drawn cups.

The relationship between engine oil formulations and catalyst performance was investigated by comparatively testing five engine oils. In addition to one baseline production oil with a calcium plus magnesium detergent system, the remaining four oils were specifically formulated with different additive combinations including: one worst case with no detergent and production level zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDTP), one with calcium-only detergent and two best cases with zero phosphorus. Emissions performance, phosphorus loss from the engine oil, phosphorus-capture on the catalyst and engine wear were evaluated after accumulating 100,000 miles of taxi service in twenty vehicles. The intent of this comparative study was to identify relative trends.

General corrosion protection of sheet materials such as steel used in automobile construction has reached a high level of performance, due primarily to the incorporation of mill-applied treatments such as electrogalvanizing, galvannealing and other coil-coating processes developed over the last half century. While such treatments have greatly extended the corrosion resistance of steel and its various body constructs, attention is now focused on aspects of the manufacturing process wherein these intended protections are compromised by such features as weldments, joins, cut edges and extreme metal deformations such as hems. A novel metal deposition process, based on high-velocity impact fusion of solid metal particles, has been used to extend the corrosion resistance of base steel and pre-galvanized sheet, by selectively placing highly controlled depositions of zinc and other sacrificial materials in close proximity to critical manufacturing details.

An obliquely incident X-ray radiography was developed to measure the greatest depths, orientations and locations of corrosion pits in automobile metallic plates. This technique can also be used on-site for components in use. The corrosion depth profile and the greatest depth can be calculated with the established relations. A 3-D rotational microscope and surface profiler were utilized to evaluate the sensitivities and accuracies of the technique for aluminum and steel plates, respectively.

Squeak and rattle is one of the major concerns in vehicle design for customer satisfaction. Traditionally squeak and rattle problems are found and fixed at a very late design stage due to lack of up-front CAE prevention and prediction tools. A research work at Ford reveals a correlation between the squeak and rattle performance and diagonal distortions at body closure openings and fastener accelerations in an instrument panel. These findings make it possible to assess squeak and rattle performance implications between different body designs using body-in-prime (B-I-P) and vehicle low frequency noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) CAE models at a very early design stage. This paper is concerned with applications of this squeak and rattle assessment method for up-front body designs prior to a prototype stage.

Customer expectations for improved performance, comfort levels, and aesthetics have led automobile manufacturers to use leather for seats, steering wheels, instrument panels, door panels, and other components. To increase the drivers’ comfort level, there is always a soft pad layer applied under the leather in the steering wheel. This paper will describe a potential failure mode that occurs when materials migrate from one material to another material in multilayer material constructions. In this case dioctyl phthalate migrated from the soft pad layer into the leather surface, affecting the durability performance of the leather coating. This paper describes the failure and demonstrates an effective test methodology to test for this failure during the materials and components validation process.

A simple and rapid immersion type corrosion test has been successfully developed that discriminates corrosion performance in condensers from various suppliers and with differing manufacturing processes. The goal is to develop a test specification that will be included in the Ford corrosion specification for condensers so that condensers received from various suppliers may be evaluated rapidly for their relative corrosion performance to each other. Sections from condensers from Supplier A (tube is silfluxed), Supplier B (tube is zinc arc sprayed), and Supplier C (bare folded tube with no zinc for corrosion protection) were tested in 2% v/v hydrochloric acid for 16, 24 and 48 hours. The results showed that in terms of corrosion performance, zinc arc sprayed Supplier B condenser performed the worst while Supplier C condenser performed the best with Supplier A in between. It was also observed that the fins, and fin-to-tube joints were first to corrode followed by the tube in all cases.

A continuous demand for added multimedia features in the automotive audio systems not only requires adequate cooling of the internal electronics, but also the media itself. Thermal engineers focus their efforts only on keeping the electronics below thresholds by conventional methods such as internal fans, heat sinks, etc., while overlooking the CD media. The environment within the instrument panel (IP) poses a challenge in maintaining the media at a temperature level that is comfortable to the human touch. This paper investigates the effectiveness of various factors that influence the CD temperature in a car player. These factors represent independent and interactive effects of the three modes of heat transfer. In this study, a design of experiment (DOE) technique is utilized to generate a response function that filters insignificant parameters and their interactions, in order to minimize the CD temperature.

Corrosion failures of aluminum air conditioner evaporator cores have been reported in regions where the climate is relatively warm and humid. Microbiologically-influenced corrosion [MIC] has been implicated in these failures. Application of surface-treatment chemicals may inhibit microbiological (bacterial) growth and/or attachment, thereby reducing the potential for MIC. In this study, two laboratory methods were developed to evaluate selected surface-treatment chemicals for their ability to inhibit bacterial growth and reduce bacterial attachment to treated surfaces. Using the developed methods, two controlled-atmosphere brazed aluminum core materials and three surface-treatment chemicals were evaluated. Neither of the untreated core materials was found to inhibit the growth of the bacteria tested.

A continuous demand for added multimedia features in the automotive audio systems not only requires adequate cooling of the internal electronics, but also the media itself. Thermal engineers focus their efforts only on keeping the electronics below thresholds by conventional methods such as internal fans, heat sinks, etc., while overlooking the CD media. The environment within the instrument panel (IP) poses additional challenge in maintaining the media at a temperature level that is comfortable to the human touch. Fans that would be a natural choice in such situations, could cause noise audible to the customer and thus create a new problem. A solid-state cooling device that uses Thermoelectric coolers (TEC) is proposed to keep the CD temperature low. The system comprises of TECs assembled with the hot side attached to a heat sink and the cold side attached to the radio top surface.

A number of metallic oxidation catalyst substrates with advanced internal structures have emerged in the past few years. In an aftertreatment application, these structures improve gas mixing by increasing turbulence within the substrate's matrix. Modeling results show these advanced structures, under some operating conditions, can be correlated to reductions in catalyst substrate volume and precious metal 1,2. Three structured metallics were compared to a baseline ceramic substrate in a designed experiment to understand the effect of advanced metallic substrates on diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC) sizing and performance. The results showed that smaller metallic DOCs coated with up to 30% less precious metal (PM) catalyst performed on par or better than the baseline ceramic DOC in terms of hydrocarbon conversion, heat-up, and pressure drop.

There is an ongoing effort in the industry to develop an accelerated corrosion test for automotive heat exchangers. This has become even more important as automakers are focusing on corrosion durability of 15 years in the field versus current target of 10 years. To this end an acid immersion test was developed and reported in a previous paper for condensers (1). This paper extends those results to evaporators and establishes the efficacy of the test using these results and those reported in the literature. The paper also discusses variability in corrosion test results as observed in tests such as ASTM G85:A3 Acidified Synthetic Sea Water Test (SWAAT), and its relation to field durability.

Recent surveys of customer satisfaction with full size pickup trucks have raised the standards for passenger comfort and refinement of such vehicles. Customers for this type of vehicle demand performance levels for attributes such as NVH, ride, and handling that previously belonged to luxury passenger cars. Along with the increased passenger comfort, full size pickup trucks must retain a tough image and be as durable as the previous generation trucks. The challenge is to design for NVH performance that can match and surpass many well behaved and “good” NVH passenger cars without any compromise in durability performance. One aspect of “good” NVH is a steering wheel which is free from vibration. As part of the development of a new design for a full sized pick up truck, an NVH subjective rating of 8-9 (10 is maximum) was targeted for the design of steering column/ instrument panel assembly.