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Current developments in automotive industry such as hybrid powertrains and the continuously increasing demands on emission control systems, are pushing complexity still further. Validation of such systems lead to a huge amount of test cases and hence extreme testing efforts on the road. At the same time the pressure to reduce costs and minimize development time is creating challenging boundaries on development teams. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to utilize testing and validation prototypes in the most efficient way. It is necessary to apply high levels of instrumentation and collect as much data as possible. And a streamlined data pipeline allows the fleet managers to get new insights from the raw data and control the validation vehicles as well as the development team in the most efficient way. In this paper we will demonstrate a data-driven approach for validation testing.

The optimization of engine NVH is still an important aspect for vehicle interior and exterior noise radiation. To optimize the engine noise / vibration contribution to the vehicle, a complete understanding of the excitation mechanism, the vibration transfer in the engine structure and the radiation efficiency of the individual engine components is required. Concerning the excitation within the engine, a very efficient analysis methodology for the combustion- and mechanical excitation within gasoline and diesel engines has been developed. Out of this methodology a software tool has been designed for a fast, efficient and detailed evaluation of the combustion- and mechanical excitation content of total engine noise. Recently this software tool has been successfully applied in engine NVH optimization work for defining the best optimization strategies for engine NVH reduction and noise quality improvement especially with respect to combustion excitation.

Vehicle driveability evolves more and more as a key decisive factor for marketability and competitiveness of passenger cars, since the final decision of customers to buy a car is usually taken after a more or less intensive test drive. Car manufacturers currently evaluate vehicle driveability with subjective assessments and by having their experienced test drivers fill out form sheets. These assessments are time and cost intensive, limited in repeatability and not objective. The real customer requirements cannot be recognized in detail with this method. This paper describes a completely new approach for an objective and real time evaluation of relevant driveability criteria, for use in a vehicle and on a high dynamic test bed. The vehicle application enables an objective comparison between vehicles and an application as a development tool in many development and calibration phases, where ever fast and objective driveability results are required.

The reduction of nitrous oxides in the exhaust gases of internal combustion engines using a urea water solution is gaining more and more importance. While maintaining the future exhaust gas emission regulations, like the Euro 6 for passenger cars and the Euro 5 for commercial vehicles, urea dosing allows the engine management to be modified to improve fuel economy as well. The system manufacturer Robert Bosch has started early to develop the necessary dosing systems for the urea water solution. More than 300.000 Units have been delivered in 2007 for heavy duty applications. Typical dosing quantities for those systems are in the range of 0.01 l/h for passenger car systems and up to 10 l/h for commercial vehicles. During the first years of development and application of urea dosing systems, instantaneous flow measuring devices were used, which were not operating fully satisfactory.

Design of cylinder heads involves complex constraints that must satisfy thermal, strength, performance, and manufacturing requirements which present a great challenge for successful development. During development of a new highly loaded cylinder head, CAE methods predicted unacceptable fatigue safety factors for the initial prototype design. Hydropulsator component testing was undertaken and the results were correlated with the analysis predictions using a statistical method to calculate failure probability. Shape optimization was undertaken to improve high cycle fatigue safety in vulnerable regions of the cylinder head water jacket for the subsequent design release. The optimization process provided more efficient design guidance than previously discovered through a traditional iterative approach. Follow-on investigations examined other shape optimization software for fatigue improvement in the cylinder head.

The incorporation of a detailed engine process calculation that takes into account thermal behavior of the engine and exhaust system is essential for a realistic simulation of transient vehicle operation. This is the only possible way to have a precise preliminary calculation of fuel consumption and emissions. Therefore, a comprehensive thermal network of the engine based on the lumped capacity method has been developed. The model allows the computation of component temperatures in steady state operation as well as in transient engine studies, e.g. investigations of engine warm-up. The model is integrated in a co-simulation environment consisting of a detailed vehicle and engine cycle simulation code. The paper describes the procedure of the co-simulation and presents several examples of warm-up simulations.

The well-to-wheel CO2 emissions and energy use of internal combustion engines (diesel and gasoline) are compared to fuel cell automotive propulsion systems. The fuel cell technologies investigated are polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC), alkaline fuel cell (AFC) and solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). The fuels are assumed to be produced from either crude oil or natural gas. The comparison is based on driving cycle simulations of a mid-class passenger car with an inertia test weight of 1350 kg. The study shows that the optimized diesel drive train (downsized mated to an integrated starter generator) achieves the best overall energy efficiency. The lowest CO2 emissions are produced by compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. Fuel cell propulsion systems achieve similar or even better CO2 emission values under hot start conditions but suffer from high energy input required during warm-up.

In order to improve the accuracy of vehicle simulation under transient cycle conditions and thus predict performance and fuel consumption, consideration of the complete system engine/drivetrain/vehicle is necessary. The coupling of otherwise independent simulation programs is therefore necessary for the vehicle and engine. The description of thermally transient processes enables the calculation of the heat balance of the engine, which in turn enables the simulation of warming up operation. Through consideration of the engine warming up process, the quality of the prediction of fuel consumption and emissions is improved. The combination of the simulation programs CRUISE and BOOST to determine the engine heat balance has proven to be successful for the analysis of transient drive cycles.

Due to its high number of free parameters, the new generation of gasoline engines with direct injection require an efficient calibration process to handle the system complexity and to avoid a dramatic increase in calibration costs. This paper presents a concept of specific toolboxes within a standardized and automated calibration environment, supporting the complexity of GDI engines and establishing standard procedures for distributed development. The basic idea is the combination of a new and more efficient online DoE approach with the automatic and adaptive identification of the region of interest in the high dimensional parameter space. This guarantees efficient experimental designs even for highly non-linear systems with often irregularly shaped valid regions. As the main advantage for the calibration engineer, the new approach requires almost no pre-investigations and no specific statistical knowledge.

Local air pollution, noise emissions as well as global CO2 reduction and public pressure drive the need for zero emission transport solutions in urban areas. OEMs are currently developing battery electric vehicles with the focus to provide emission free urban transportation combined with lowest total cost of ownership and consequently a positive business case for the end customers. Thereby the main challenges are electric range, product cost, system weight, vehicle packaging and durability. Hence they are the main drivers in current developments. In this paper AVL describes two of its truck and bus solutions - a modular battery concept as well as a concept for an integrated electric axle. Based on the vehicle requirements concept designs for both systems are presented.

The reduction of CO₂ emissions represents a major goal of governments worldwide. In developed countries, approximately 20% of the CO₂ emissions originate from transport, one third of this from commercial vehicles. CO₂ emission legislation is in place for passenger cars in a number of major markets. For commercial vehicles such legislation was also already partly published or is under discussion. Furthermore the commercial vehicles market is very cost sensitive. Thus the major share of fuel cost in the total cost of ownership of commercial vehicles was already in the past a major driver for the development of efficient drivetrain solutions. These aspects make the use of new powertrain technologies, specifically hybridization, mandatory for future commercial powertrains. While some technologies offer a greater potential for CO₂ reduction than others, they might not represent the overall optimum with regard to the total cost of ownership.

In this paper, the multi-physical simulation workflow from electromagnetics to structural dynamics for a squirrel-cage induction machine is explored. In electromagnetic simulations, local forces and rotor torque are calculated for specific speed-torque operation points. In order to consider non-linearities and interaction with control system as well as transmission, time-domain simulations are carried out. For induction machines, the computational effort with full transient numerical methods like finite element analysis (FEA) is very high. A novel reduced order electro-mechanical model is presented. It still accounts for vibro-acoustically relevant harmonics due to pulse-width modulation (PWM), slotting, distributed winding and saturation effects, but is substantially faster (minutes to hours instead of days to weeks per operation point).

The safety of BEVs in driving, charging and parking condition is essential for the success of electrification in automotive industry as well as key driver of any future development of Li-Ion HV battery. AVL has developed a unique simulation approach in which the multi-physical behavior of the single cell in thermal runaway is modelled and applied to module, pack or vehicle level. In addition and beside this cell behavior, various more physical phenomena during thermal propagation on pack level are considered and predicted by the simulation method: component melting, ignition and flammibilty of venting gas and HV failures.

The paper gives an overview of the partially extremely complex problem when looking into commonalities and differences of the three main application areas of engines and powertrains - automotive, agricultural tractors, and industrial engines, the last being predominantly but not exclusively focused on construction equipment. The modern “platform” approach has been used in the automotive world to a large extent and the learned experiences may be of interest for the agricultural tractors and/or the construction equipment manufacturers. On the other hand the truck engine engineers and manufacturers will learn more about the special requirements of the tractor and the industrial engines fields, and thus influence concepts and development procedures and also the production of the automotive engines which in many cases serve as the basis for derivate engines.

The paper describes a feasibility test program on a 2 liter, 4 cylinder DI/TCI passenger car engine operated on the new alternative fuel Dimethyl Ether (DME, CH3 - O - CH3) with the aim of demonstrating its potential of meeting ULEV emissions (0.2 g/mi NOx in the FTP 75 test cycle) when installed in a full size passenger car. Special attention is drawn to the fuel injection equipment (FIE) as well as combustion system requirements towards the reduction of NOx and combustion noise while keeping energetic fuel consumption at the level of the baseline DI/TCI diesel engine. FIE and combustion system parameters were optimized on the steady state dynamometer by variation of a number of parameters, such as rate of injection, number of nozzle holes, compression ratio, piston bowl shape and exhaust gas recirculation.

This report shows the methods, which AVL uses for the calculation of gear box noise. The analysis of the gear box structure (housing) is done using finite element method (FEM), thereby the natural frequencies are calculated as well as forced vibrations. As input for the FE calculation of the forced vibrations, the dynamic bearing forces of the shafts in the gear box or the dynamic tooth mesh are used. These forces are determined using the MBS (multi body system) software GTDYN, considering the torsional vibrations as well as axial and bending vibrations. Several examples of calculation results for the investigation of the gear dynamics are shown within the scope of this report.

The AVL Load Matrix is a systematic approach to optimize durability and reliability test programs. It is based on component-specific test acceleration factors and uses damage models as well as statistics. Using the Load Matrix approach helps to achieve complete test programs while avoiding unrealistic over-testing. The paper describes the Load Matrix concept and structure as well as the process of setting up the Load Matrix for a system or component. Examples are provided on damage models, and the procedure to estimate the acceleration factors is discussed.

The rapidly growing complexity and the growing cross linking of powertrain components leads to longer development times, especially in the vehicle calibration process. The number of systems which need to be fitted to each other and the number of parameters to be calibrated in the particular systems are increasing tremendously. The extensive use of simulation promises to reduce the calibration effort by providing pre-optimized parameter sets. This paper describes a new simulation methodology by the interlinking of advanced vehicle simulation and evaluation tools, in particular the AVL-tools CRUISE, VSM and DRIVE. This methodology allows to semi automatically pre-optimize powertrain and vehicle parameters before hardware is involved. So far the pre-calibration of vehicle and powertrain parameters by simulation was not satisfying because of the missing of a reliable evaluation tool for the produced simulation results.

HTOE (High Temperature Operation Endurance) and PTCE (Power Thermal Cycle Endurance) tests are typically performed according automotive group standards, such as LV 124 [1], VW80000 [2], FCA CS.00056 [3] or PSA B21 7130 [4]. The LV 124-2 group standard, composed by representatives of automobile manufacturers like Audi AG, BMW AG, Volkswagen AG and Porsche AG describes a wide range of environmental tests and their requirements. In addition, calculation parameters and a method are given in the standard. These group standard tests are often attributed to IEC 60068-2-2 [5] for HTOE and IEC 60068-2-14 [6] for PTCE. As both of these tests are typically of long duration, fundamentally linked to reliability (therefore requiring a statistically significant number of samples) and of considerable importance to power electronic, they are worthy of additional scrutiny for automotive developers as most automotive development moves towards electrification.

For the development of complex control algorithms and strategies the engine and powertrain test bed offers a number of advantages over the development in the prototype vehicle. The paper discusses how state-of-the-art simulation techniques can contribute to a continuous development process, which is based upon offline simulation using hardware in the loop, the utilization of modern test bed technology up to vehicle adjustment. The integration of hardware-in-the-loop testing together with vehicle and transmission simulation on the testbed allows to speed up the optimization of fuel consumption, emissions and driveability in an early stage in the development process. The available software tools are presented and application examples are given.