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Consumers design different PHEVs than expert analysts assume. Experts almost uniformly assume PHEVs that offer true all-electric driving for 10 to 60 miles; consumers are more likely to design PHEVs that do not offer true all-electric driving and have short ranges over which they use grid-electricity. Thus consumers? PHEV designs are less expensive. These consumer PHEV designs do, or don?t, produce lower GHG emissions than experts? PHEVs over the next ten years. The devil is in the details, i.e., which powerplant emissions to assign to new electricity demand: marginal or average. If (based on marginal powerplant emissions) it makes almost no difference whether we sell consumer-designed or expert-assumed PHEVs over the next ten years, yet as the grid continues to de-carbonize all-electric PHEV designs emerge as clearly the better option, there is a trajectory we could be on from blended, ?short range? PHEVs to all-electric ?long range? PHEVs.

The high cost and competitive nature of automotive product development necessitates the search for less expensive and faster methods of predicting vehicle performance. Continual improvements in High Performance Computing (HPC) and new computational schemes allow for the digital evaluation of vehicle comfort parameters including wind noise. Recently, the commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code PowerFlow, was evaluated for its accuracy in predicting wind noise generated by an external automotive tow mirror. This was accomplished by running simulations of several mirror configurations, choosing the quietest mirror based on the predicted performance, prototyping it, and finally, confirming the prediction with noise measurements taken in an aeroacoustic wind tunnel. Two testing methods, beam-forming and direct noise measurements, were employed to correlate the physical data with itself before correlating with simulation.

This paper presents a simulation of the cooling airflow and surface temperatures of a midsize truck. The simulation uses full detailed geometry of the truck. Performance of the under-hood cooling airflow is analyzed and potential design changes leading to better cooling airflow are highlighted. Surface temperature over certain under-hood part is studied. Possible optimizations using various material and configurations are proposed. It is shown that the presented simulation approach provides valuable information to evaluate cooling system and thermal protection performance. Fast design iterations can be achieved using this approach.

In the analysis for durability or R&H performance with the full vehicle multibody models, the need for component flexibility is increasing along with demand for more precise full vehicle system. The component elastic deformations are usually expressed by modal superposition from component normal mode analysis with finite element model for reducing model size and simulation time. Although the simulation results of MBD analysis are more accurate according to increasing the number of flexible body and modes, the increasing of flexible components makes worse simulation time and convergence in MBD analysis. Especially, in the MBD analysis including a flexible upper body, in substitution for large number degree of freedom FE model such as trimmed body, it should take a few times longer than the case of rigid upper body This paper proposes the methods of reducing computational cost with adequate mode selections without the loss of simulation accuracy in the flexible MBD.

For most car manufacturers, wind noise from the greenhouse region has become the dominant high frequency noise contributor at highway speeds. Addressing this wind noise issue using experimental procedures involves high cost prototypes, expensive wind tunnel sessions, and potentially late design changes. To reduce the associated costs as well as development times, there is strong motivation for the use of a reliable numerical prediction capability early in the vehicle design process. Previously, a computational approach that couples an unsteady computational fluid dynamics solver (based on a Lattice Boltzmann method) to a Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) solver had been validated for predicting the noise contribution from the side mirrors. This paper presents the use of this computational approach to predict the vehicle interior noise from the windshield wipers, so that different wiper placement options can be evaluated early in the design process before the surface is frozen.

Wind noise is a significant source of interior noise in automobiles at cruising conditions, potentially creating dissatisfaction with vehicle quality. While wind noise contributions at higher frequencies usually originate with transmission through greenhouse panels and sealing, the contribution coming from the underbody area often dominates the interior noise spectrum at lower frequencies. Continued pressure to reduce fuel consumption in new designs is causing more emphasis on aerodynamic performance, to reduce drag by careful management of underbody airflow at cruise. Simulation of this airflow by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools allows early optimization of underbody shapes before expensive hardware prototypes are feasible. By combining unsteady CFD-predicted loads on the underbody panels with a structural acoustic model of the vehicle, underbody wind noise transmission could be considered in the early design phases.

The NVH study of trimmed vehicle body is essential in improving the passenger comfort and optimizing the vehicle weight. Efficient modal finite-element approaches are widely used in the automotive industry for investigating the frequency response of large vibro-acoustic systems involving a body structure coupled to an acoustic cavity. In order to accurately account for the localized and frequency-dependant damping mechanism of the trim components, a direct physical approach is however preferred. Thus, a hybrid modal-physical approach combines both efficiency and accuracy for large trimmed body analysis. Dynamic loads and exterior acoustic loads can then be applied on the trimmed body model in order to evaluate the transfer functions between these loads and the acoustic response in the car compartment.

The assessment of the Transmission Loss (TL) of vehicle components at Low-Mid Frequencies generally raises difficulties associated to the physical mechanisms of the noise transmission through the automotive panel. As far as testing is concerned, it is common in the automotive industry to perform double room TL measurements of component baffled cut-outs, while numerical methods are rather applied when prototype or hardware variants are not available. Indeed, in the context of recent efforts for reduction of vehicle prototypes, the use of simulation is constantly challenged to deliver reliable means of decision during virtual design phase. While the Transfer matrix method is commonly and conveniently used at Mid-High frequencies for the calculation of a trimmed panel, the simulation of energy transfer at low frequencies must take into account modal interactions between the vehicle component and the acoustic environment.

For (benchmark) tests it is not only useful to study the acoustic performance of the whole vehicle, but also to assess separate components such as the engine. Reflections inside the engine bay bias the acoustic radiation estimated with sound pressure based solutions. Consequently, most current methods require dismounting the engine from the car and installing it in an anechoic room to measure the sound emitted. However, this process is laborious and hard to perform. In this paper, two particle velocity based methods are proposed to characterize the sound radiated from an engine while it is still installed in the car. Particle velocity sensors are much less affected by reflections than sound pressure microphones when the measurements are performed near a radiating surface due to the particle velocity's vector nature, intrinsic dependency upon surface displacement and directivity of the sensor. Therefore, the engine does not have to be disassembled, which saves time and money.

In the development of an FAW SUV, one of the goals is to achieve a state of the art drag level. In order to achieve such an aggressive target, feedback from aerodynamics has to be included in the early stage of the design decision process. The aerodynamic performance evaluation and improvement is mostly based on CFD simulation in combination with some wind tunnel testing for verification of the simulation results. As a first step in this process, a fully detailed simulation model is built. The styling surface is combined with engine room and underbody detailed geometry from a similar size existing vehicle. From a detailed analysis of the flow field potential areas for improvement are identified and five design parameters for modifying overall shape features of the upper body are derived. In a second step, a response surface method involving design of experiments and adaptive sampling techniques are applied for characterizing the effects of the design changes.

On-highway tractor-trailer vehicles operate in a complex aerodynamic environment that includes influences of surrounding vehicles. Typical aerodynamic analyses and testing of single vehicles on test track, in wind tunnel or in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) do not account for these real world effects. However, it is possible with simulation and on-road testing to evaluate these aerodynamic interactions. CFD and physical testing of multiple vehicle interactions show that traffic interactions can impact the overall drag of leading and trailing vehicles. This paper will discuss results found in evaluating the effects of separation distances on tractor-trailer aerodynamics in on-road and CFD evaluations using a time-accurate Lattice Boltzmann Method based approach and the ramifications for improving real world prediction versus controlled single vehicle testing.

Fuel efficiency for tractor/trailer combinations continues to be a key area of focus for manufacturers and suppliers in the commercial vehicle industry. Improved fuel economy of vehicles in transit can be achieved through reductions in aerodynamic drag, tire rolling resistance, and driveline losses. Fuel economy can also be increased by improving the efficiency of the thermal to mechanical energy conversion of the engine. One specific approach to improving the thermal efficiency of the engine is to implement a waste heat recovery (WHR) system that captures engine exhaust heat and converts this heat into useful mechanical power through use of a power fluid turbine expander. Several heat exchangers are required for this Rankine-based WHR system to collect and reject the waste heat before and after the turbine expander. The WHR condenser, which is the heat rejection component of this system, can be an additional part of the front-end cooling module.

It is known that SEA is a rapid and simple methodology for analyzing complex vibroacoustic systems. However, the SEA principle is not always valid and one has to be careful about the physical conditions at which the SEA principle is acceptable. In this study, the appropriate damping loss factor of the vehicle interior cavity is studied in the viewpoint of the modal overlap factor of the cavity and the decay per mean free path (DMFP) of the cavity. Virtual SEA tests are performed with an FE model combination, which is suggested by a previous study of Stelzer et al. for the simulation of the sound transmission loss (STL) of vehicle panel structure. The FE model combination is consisting of the body in white (BIW), an acoustical-excited hemisphere-shaped exterior cavity, and the interior cavity. It is found that the DMFP of the interior cavity is appropriate between 0.5 ~ 1 dB for applying SEA principle.

In general, when a problem occurs in a component of powertrains, various phenomena appear, and abnormal noise is one of them. The service mechanics diagnose the noise through analysis by using their ears and equipment. However, depending on their experiences, analysis time and diagnostic accuracy vary greatly. To shorten the analysis time and improve the diagnostic accuracy, we have developed a technology to diagnose powertrain parts that cause abnormal noises. To create the best deep learning model for our diagnosis, we tried to collect many abnormal noises from various parts. The collected noise data was measured under idle and various operating conditions from our vehicles and test cells. This noise data is abnormal noises generated from engines, transmissions, drive system and PE (Power Electric) parts of eco-friendly vehicles. From the collected data, we distinguished good and bad data through detailed analysis in time and frequency domain.

This paper presents a tire slip-angle based speed control race driver model. In developing a chassis control system for enhancement of high-speed driving performance, analysis of the vehicle-driver interaction at limit handling is one of the main research issues. Thus, a driver model which represents driving characteristics in a racing situation is required to develop a chassis control system. Since a race driver drives a vehicle as fast as possible on a given racing line without losing control, the proposed driver model is developed to ensure a lateral stability. In racing situation, one of the reasons which cause the lateral instabilities is an excessive corner-entry speed. The lateral instability in that moment is hard to handle with only a steering control. To guarantee the lateral stability of the vehicle while maximizing a cornering speed, a desired speed is determined to retain a tire slip-angle that maximizes lateral tire forces without front tire saturation.

An important trend among vehicle NVH engineers is the production of attractive engine acceleration sound quality for the enhancement of a vehicle's image and performance. In addition, customers have increasing interest and enjoyment in customizing their cars to reflect their personal taste and preferences. The PESS (Personalized Engine Sound System) has been developed for making a unique and individually customizable vehicle concept. The system allows the customers an opportunity to create a variety of engine sounds in a single vehicle using active sound design technology. In this system, three different engine sound concepts are pre-defined, Dynamic, Sporty, and Extreme. Each of the engine sounds can then be adjusted with parameters that determine the timbre, such as main order, rumble, and high order. In addition, the pedal position during acceleration has also been used as a parameter to further personalize the experience.

For the automotive industry, the quality and level of the wind noise contribution has a growing importance and therefore should be addressed as early as possible in the development process. Each component of the vehicle is designed to meet its individual noise target to ensure the wind noise passenger comfort level inside the vehicle is met. Sunroof broadband noise is generated by the turbulent flow developed over the roof opening. A strong shear layer and vortices impacting on the trailing edge of the sunroof are typical mechanisms related to the noise production. Sunroof designs are tested to meet broadband noise targets. Experimentally testing designs and making changes to meet these design targets typically involves high cost prototypes, expensive wind tunnel sessions and potentially late design changes.

The object of the validation study presented in this paper is a generic vehicle, the so-called SAE body, developed by a consortium of German car manufacturers (Audi, Daimler, Porsche, Volkswagen). Many experiments have been performed by the abovementioned consortium on this object in the past to investigate its behavior when exposed to fluid flow. Some of these experiments were used to validate the simulation results discussed in the present paper. It is demonstrated that the simulation of the exterior flow is able to represent the transient hydrodynamic structures and at the same time both the generation of the acoustic sources and the propagation of the acoustic waves. Performing wave number filtering allows to identify the acoustic phenomena and separate them from the hydrodynamic effects. In a next step, the noise transferred to the interior of the cabin through the glass panel was calculated, using a Statistical Energy Analysis approach.

Exhaust and muffler noise is a challenging problem in the transport industry. While the main purpose of the system is to reduce the intensity of the acoustic pulses originating from the engine exhaust valves, the back pressure induced by these systems must be kept to a minimum to guarantee maximum performance of the engine. Emitted noise levels have to ensure comfort of the passengers and must respect community noise regulations. In addition, the exhaust noise plays an important role in the brand image of vehicles, especially with sports car where it must be tuned to be “musical”. However, to achieve such performances, muffler and exhaust designs have become quite complex, often leading to the rise of undesired self-induced noise. Traditional purely acoustic solvers, like Boundary Element Methods (BEM), have been applied quite successfully to achieve the required acoustic tuning.

In the brake system, unevenly distributed disc-pad contact pressure not only leads to a falling-off in braking feeling due to uneven wear of brake pads, but also a main cause of system instability which leads to squeal noise. For this reason there have been several attempts to measure contact pressure distribution. However, only static pressure distribution has been measured in order to estimate the actual pressure distribution. In this study a new test method is designed to quantitatively measure dynamic contact pressure distribution between disc and pad in vehicle testing. The characteristics of dynamic contact pressure distribution are analyzed for various driving conditions and pad shape. Based on those results, CAE model was updated and found to be better in detecting propensity of brake squeal.