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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.

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.

High-voltage battery system plays a critical role in eco-friendly vehicles due to its effect on the cost and the electric driving range of eco-friendly vehicles. In order to secure the customer pool and the competitiveness of eco-vehicle technology, vehicle electrification requires lowering the battery cost and satisfying the customer needs when driving the vehicles in the real roads, for example, maximizing powers for fun drive, increasing battery capacities for achieving appropriate trip distances, etc. Because these vehicle specifications have a critical effect on the high-voltage battery specification, the key technology of the vehicle electrification is the appropriate decision on the specification of the high-voltage battery system, such as battery capacity and power. These factors affect the size of battery system and vehicle under floor design and also the profitability of the eco-friendly vehicles.

Passenger fatigue during long distance driving is greatly influenced by the comfort performance of the seat. Seat comfort performance is determined by the appropriate contour of the seat and the appropriate pad with sufficient thickness. The height of vehicle has been lowered to enhance car styling, and battery for electric vehicle applied to the underbody of the vehicle, reducing the package space of the seat in the vehicle. These external factors eventually lead to a reduced pad thickness of the seat cushion and compromise one of the important components in the seat cushion compartment, creating an uncomfortable cushioning problem when driving long distances. To improve the cushion composition of the seat within a limited package, air bladders are applied to the underside of the cushion pad. In addition, the function to support the buttocks using the air bladders of the lower cushion, similar to lumbar support for the back, was implemented to improve cushion comfort performance.

The software must be verified and optimized from time to time to ensure system performance quality from the development process. Because the later you discover performance issues, the greater the cost of performance improvements, along with the extent to which they are fixed in the source code. In particular, performance problems due to poor system design should be identified and corrected as soon as possible. Also, as development progresses, source code added for new features and modified by bugs can potentially increase system resource usage or worsen responsiveness. Therefore, the development process needs to periodically measure, analyze, and improve system performance. This paper introduces the system-wide performance analyzer and explains how to use it to measure and analyze the performance of the infotainment system for performance management and improvement.

The windshield is an integral part of almost every modern passenger car. Combined with current developments in the automotive industry such as electrification and the integration of lightweight material systems, the reduction of interior noise caused by stochastic and transient wind excitation is deemed to be an increasing challenge for future NVH measures. Active control systems have proven to be a viable alternative compared to traditional passive NVH measures in different areas. However, for windshield actuation there are neither comparative studies nor actually established actuation concepts available to the automotive industry. This paper illustrates a comparative conceptual study on windshield actuation for the active control of wind noise in a passenger car. Making use of an experimental modal analysis of the windshield installed in a medium-sized vehicle, a reduced order numerical simulation model is derived.

This paper introduces a systematic wiring guideline which includes coupling noise calculation, wire layout design, and wire type selection methodologies. The coupling theory between wires has been introduced long time ago but it was not successfully applied to real automotive wiring design due to the complexity in the theory such as large number of parameters and many different conditions in automotive wiring environment. In this paper, the complexity is reduced by separating physical parameters and electrical parameters and identifying controllable parameters and given parameters. This paper first introduces parameters which are used in the coupling equations and automotive wiring design, then the coupling noise calculation method which uses the coupling equations is introduced. The systematic automotive wiring guideline which prevents noise problem in various design stage such as system filter design, wire layout design, wire type selection is introduced.

The alternator provides power to vehicle electrical loads with the battery, and its maximum current depends on various factors such as electrical load, engine speed, thermal condition, and other variables. Above all, thermal effects make alternator simulations more complicated. For example statically similar conditions may show different results according to the temperature variation for each alternator operation. This paper proposes a two-stage statistically-based model structure which separates dynamic thermal effects from steady state performance. The method was validated by experiments and shows good predictive performance, suitable for use in test reduction.

This paper proposes a modeling technique which is able to not only reliably and easily represent the hysteretic characteristics but also analyze the dynamic stress of a taper leaf spring. The flexible multi-body dynamic model of the taper leaf spring is developed by interfacing the finite element model and computation model of the taper leaf spring. Rigid dummy parts are attached at the places where a finite element leaf model is in contact with an adjacent one in order to apply contact model. Friction is defined in the contact model to represent the hysteretic phenomenon of the taper leaf spring. The test of the taper leaf spring is conducted for the validation of the reliability of the flexible multi-body dynamic model of the taper leaf spring developed in this paper. The test is started at an unloaded state with the excitation amplitude of 1∼2mm/sec and frequency of 132mm. First, the simulation is conducted with the same condition as the test.

3D digital human modeling (DHM) tools for vehicle packaging facilitate ergonomic design and evaluation based on anthropometry, comfort, and force analysis. It is now possible to quickly predict postures and positions for drivers with selected anthropometry based on ergonomics principles. Despite their powerful visual representation technology for human movements and postures, these tools are still questioned with regard to the validity of the output they provide, especially when predictions are made for different populations. Driving postures and positions of two populations (i.e. North Americans and Koreans) were measured in actual and mock-up SUVs to investigate postural differences and evaluate the results provided by a DHM tool. No difference in driving postures was found between different stature groups within the same population. Between the two populations, however, preferred angles differed for three joints (i.e., ankle, thigh, and hip).

This paper describes an automated path following system using vision sensor. Lateral control law for path following is especially underlined which is developed by using the backstepping control design methodology. To establish the proposed control system, the lateral offset to the reference path, the heading angle of vehicle relative to tangent line to the path, and path curvature are required. Those inputs to the controller have been calculated through Kalman filter which is frequently adopted for the purpose. The lane mark detection has been achieved in an ECU (Electric Control Unit) platform with vision sensor. The yaw rate and side-slip angle also needed in the controller are estimated by Kalman estimator. To show the performance of the proposed controller under different speeds, experiment has been conducted on a proving ground having straight and curve sections with the curvature of about 260m.

Shudder vibration of a hydraulic power steering system during parking maneuver was studied with numerical and experimental methods. To quantify vibration performance of the system and recognize important stimuli for drivers, a shudder metric was derived by correlation between objective measurements and subjective ratings. A CAE model for steering wheel vibration analysis was developed and compared with measured data. In order to describe steering input dependency of shudder, a new dynamic friction modeling method, in which the magnitude of effective damping is determined by average velocity, was proposed. The developed model was validated using the measured steering wheel acceleration and the pressure change at inlet of the steering gear box. It was shown that the developed model successfully describes major modes by comparing the calculated FRF of the hydraulic system with measured one from the hydraulic excitation test.

Applying BSM (Balance shaft module) is a very common and effective way to reduce the 2nd-order powertrain vibration which is caused by the ill-balanced inertia force due to the oscillating masses inside an engine. However, the adoption of a BSM can also produce undesirable things especially in cost, fuel economy, starting performance, and so on. Therefore, for small vehicles, in which case cost and weight are key factors at the development stage, it is often required to develop competitive NVH performance without the expensive apparatus like a BSM. In this paper, in order to develop interior noise and vibration of a 4-cylinder vehicle without a BSM, we analyzed the contribution of some transfer paths for powertrain vibration, and could reduce interior booming noise by tuning the dynamic characteristic of the engine mount which was one of the largest transfer paths.

With the advent of cars with computerized engines, drivers sometimes suffer discomfort with “check engine” light problem, and as a result, insist on increasing levels of reliability in their cars. Hence, reliability of the wiring harness has become a very important automotive design characteristic. On one hand, the more secure an engine mounting system is, the more stable the engine wiring harness is. In order to enhance their durability, car manufacturers need to perform many validation tests during the development phase which involves a lot of time and cost. In this study, a newly developed lab-simulation test is proposed to qualify the design of engine mounting and engine wiring early in the design cycle and reduce time and expense. The lab-simulation test has contributed to a significant cost and time reduction and has shown good correlation to the original proving ground test.

In general, driving performance is developed to meet preference of average customers. But there is no single standardized guideline which can satisfy various driving tastes of all drivers whose gender, cultural background, and age are different. To resolve this issue, automotive companies have introduced drive mode buttons which drivers can manually select from Normal, Eco, and Sport driving modes. Although this multi-mode manual systems is more efficient than single-mode system, it is in a transient state where drivers need to go through troubles of frequently selecting their preferred drive mode in volatile driving situations It is also doubtful whether the three-categorized driving mode can meet complex needs of drivers.. In order to settle these matters, it is necessary to analyze individual driving style automatically and to provide customized driving performance service in real time.

One of the ways to improve the fuel efficiency of the HEV (Hybrid and Electric Vehicles) is to optimize automotive electric system. In order to achieve this, the LDC (Low voltage DC-DC Converter) variable voltage was controlled. Using the ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) map, the charge-discharge behaviors of 12V lead-acid battery was predicted during driving so that, the battery could be charged efficiently. In this study, the feedback control system for 12V battery discharging was designed to compromise between the 12V battery SOC (State of Charge) and the driving conditions at different traffic points. In contrast to earlier approaches, this experimental result indicates that the LDC variable voltage control based on ADAS is able to reduce the LDC average output power by 17.1% therefore, increasing fuel efficiency and ensuring the durability of the 12V battery.

The engine indicated torque is not delivered entirely to the wheels, because it is lowered by losses, such as the pumping, mechanical friction and front auxiliary power consumption. The front auxiliary belt drive system is a big power consumer-fueling and operating the various accessory devices, such as air conditioning compressor, electric alternator, and power steering pump. The standard fuel economy test does not consider the auxiliary driving torque when it is activated during the actual driving condition and it is considered a five-cycle correction factor only. Therefore, research on improving the front end auxiliary drive (FEAD) system is still relevant in the immediate future, particularly regarding the air conditioning compressor and the electric alternator. An exertion to minimize the auxiliary loss is much smaller than the sustained effort required to reduce engine friction loss.

The current sensor for motor control is one of the main components in inverters for eco-friendly vehicles. Recently, as the higher performance of torque control has become required, the current sensor measurement error and accuracy of motor controls have become more significant. Since the response time of the sensor affects the motor output power, the response delay of the sensor causes measurement errors of the current. Accordingly, the voltage vector changes, and a motor output power deviation occurs. In the case of the large response delay of the sensor, as motor speed increases, then difference between motoring and generating output power becomes larger and larger. This results in the deterioration of power performance in high-speed operation. The deviation of the voltage vector magnitude is the main cause of motor output power deviation and imbalance through the simulation.

Conventional EPS (Electric Power Steering) systems are operated by one type of steering tuning map set by steering test drivers before being released to customers. That is, the steering efforts can't change in many different driving conditions such as road conditions (low mu, high mu and unpaved roads) or some specific driving conditions (sudden stopping, entering into EPS failure modes and full accelerating). Those conditions can't give drivers consistent steering efforts. This paper approached the new concept technology detecting those conditions by using vehicle and EPS sensors such as tire wheel speeds, vehicle speed, steering angle, steering torque, steering speed and so on. After detecting those conditions and judging what the best steering efforts for safe vehicle driving are, EPS systems automatically can be changed with the steering friction level and selection of steering optimized mapping on several conditions.

Professional bus drivers are highly exposed to physical fatigue and work-related injuries because driving task includes complicated actions that require a variety of ability and cause extreme concentration or strain. For this reason, there has always been some sense of concern regarding driver fatigue, especially for drivers of commercial vehicles. In this study, we have tried to analyze quantitative fatigue degree of urban bus drivers by measuring their physiological signals. The investigation is made up of the following approaches: a traditional questionnaire survey and video-ethnographic method with 4-way cameras. The close-circuit cameras are installed to observe the upper and lower body of real drivers when they are in driving or even resting. This approach can help to understand urban bus drivers' behaviors and fatigue-related issues. Based on the video-ethnographic investigation results above, we have got certain patterns of drivers.