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Determination of an engine's inertial properties is critical during vehicle dynamic analysis and the early stages of engine mounting system design. Traditionally, the inertia tensor can be determined by torsional pendulum method with a reasonable precision, while the center of gravity can be determined by placing it in a stable position on three scales with less accuracy. Other common experimental approaches include the use of frequency response functions. The difficulty of this method is to align the directions of the transducers mounted on various positions on the engine. In this paper, an experimental method to estimate an engine's inertia tensor and center of gravity is presented. The method utilizes the traditional torsional pendulum method, but with additional measurement data. With this method, the inertia tensor and center of gravity are estimated in a least squares sense.

This paper summarizes a study on axle balance measurement and balancing strategies. Seven types of axles were investigated. Test samples were randomly selected from products. Two significant development questions were set out to be answered: 1) What is the minimum rotational speed possible in order to yield measured imbalance readings which correlated to in-vehicle imbalance-related vibration. What is the relationship between the measured imbalance and rotational speed. To this end, the imbalance level of each axle was measured using a test rig with different speeds from 800 to 4000 rpm with 200 rpm increments. 2) Is it feasible to balance axle sub-assemblies only and still result in a full-assembly that satisfies the assembled axle specification? To this end, the sub-assemblies were balanced on a balance machine to a specified level. Then with these balanced sub-assemblies, the full assemblies were completed and audited on the same balance test rig in the same way.

Brake torque variation is a source of objectionable NVH body/chassis response. Such input commonly results from brake disk thickness variation. The NVH dynamic characteristics of a vehicle can be assessed and quantified through experimental modal testing for determination of mode resonance frequency, damping property, and shape. Standard full vehicle modal testing typically utilizes a random input excitation into the vehicle frame or underbody structure. An alternative methodology was sought to quantify and predict body/chassis sensitivity to brake torque variation. This paper presents a review of experimental modal test methodologies investigated for the reproduction of vehicle response to brake torque variation in a static laboratory environment. Brake caliper adapter random and sine sweep excitation input as well as body sine sweep excitation in tandem with an intentionally locked brake will be detailed.

This paper investigates the aerodynamic simulation accuracy of several types of wind tunnel test sections. Computational simulations were performed with a closed wheel race car in an 11.0 m2 adaptive wall, a 16.8 m2 open jet, and a 29.7 m2 slotted wall test section, corresponding to model blockage ratios of 20.9%, 13.7%, and 7.7%, respectively. These are compared to a simulation performed in a nearly interference-free condition having a blockage ratio of 0.05%, which for practical purposes of comparison, is considered a free air condition. The results demonstrate that the adaptive wall most closely simulates the free air condition without the need for interference corrections. In addition to this advantage, the significantly smaller size of the adaptive wall test section offers lower capital and operating costs.

One of the primary reasons that FMVSS 111 currently requires flat rearview mirrors as original equipment on the driver's side of passenger cars is a concern that convex mirrors might reduce safety by causing drivers to overestimate the distances to following vehicles. Several previous studies of the effects of convex rearview mirrors have indicated that they do cause overestimations of distance, but of much lower magnitude than would be expected based on the mirrors' levels of image minification and the resulting visual angles experienced by drivers. Previous studies have investigated mirrors with radiuses of curvature up to 2000 mm. The present empirical study was designed to investigate the effects of mirrors with larger radiuses (up to 8900 mm). Such results are of interest because of the possible use of large radiuses in some aspheric mirror designs, and because of the information they provide about the basic mechanisms by which convex mirrors affect distance perception.

During the design process for a vehicle, the CAD surface geometry becomes available at an early stage so that numerical assessment of aerodynamic performance may accompany the design of the vehicle's shape. Accurate prediction requires open grille models with detailed underhood and underbody geometry with a high level of detail on the upper body surface, such as moldings, trim and parting lines. These details are also needed for aeroacoustics simulations to compute wall-pressure fluctuations, and for thermal management simulations to compute underhood cooling, surface temperatures and heat exchanger effectiveness. This paper presents the results of a significant effort to capitalize on the investment required to build a detailed virtual model of a pickup truck in order to simultaneously assess performance factors for aerodynamics, aeroacoustics and thermal management.

Tailor welded steel blanks have long been applied in stamping of automotive parts such as door inner, b-pillar, rail, sill inner and liftgate inner, etc. However, there are few known tailor welded aluminum blanks in production. Traditional laser welding equipment simply does not have the capability to weld aluminum since aluminum has much higher reflectivity than steel. Welding quality is another issue since aluminum is highly susceptible to pin holes and undercut which leads to deterioration in formability. In addition, high amount of springback for aluminum panels can result in dimension control problem during assembly. A tailor-welded aluminum blank can help reducing dimension variability by reducing the need for assembly. In this paper, application of friction stir and plasma arc welded blanks on a liftgate inner will be discussed.

In automotive testing, a chassis dynamometer is typically used, during cell testing, to evaluate vehicle performance by simulating actual driving conditions. The use of indoor cell testing has the advantage of running controlled tests where the cell temperature and humidity and solar loads can be well controlled. Driving conditions such as vehicle speed, wind speed and grade can be also controlled. Thus, repeated tests can be conducted with minimum test variations. The tractive effort required at the wheels of a vehicle for a given set of operating parameters is determined by taking into account a set of variables which affect vehicle performance. The forces considered in determination of the tractive effort include the constant friction force, variable friction force due to mechanical and tire friction, forces due to inertia and forces due to aerodynamic and wind effects. In addition, forces due to gravity are considered when road grades are simulated.

Brake judder, which is a low frequency excitation of the suspension and thus, the body structure during low-G braking, is mainly felt at the steering wheel and throughout the vehicle structure. Brake judder is a problem that costs manufacturers millions of dollars in warranty cost and undesirable trade offs. The magnitude of judder response depends not only on the brake torque variation, but also on the suspension design character-istics. This paper discusses the judder simulation process using ADAMS software to investigate the suspension design sensitivity to the first order brake judder performance. The paper recommends “tuning knobs” to suspension designers and vehicle development engineers to resolve issues in the design and development stages. Various suspension design varia-bles including geometry and compliances as well as brake related characteristics were investigated.

The primary advantage of an Adaptive Wall wind tunnel is that the test section walls and ceiling are contoured to closely approximate the ‘open road' flowfield around the test vehicle. This reproduction of the open road flowfield then results in aerodynamic forces and moments on the test vehicle that are consistent with actual open road forces and moments. Aerodynamic data measured in the adaptive wall test section do not require blockage corrections for adjusting the data to open road results. Extensive full scale experiments, published scale model studies, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies have verified the simulation capability of adaptive wall technology. For the CFD study described here, high-downforce, open-wheel race cars were studied. The numerical simulations with a race car in an Adaptive Wall Test Section (AWTS) wind tunnel are compared with simulations in ‘free air' condition and in a closed wall test section.

In this study, a full vehicle with durability tire model established with ADAMS is applied to simulate the dynamic behavior of the vehicle under severe rough road proving ground events, where the shock force-velocity characteristics are modeled as nonlinear curves and multi-stage representations, respectively. The shock forces and velocities at each corner are resolved and through full factorial DOE, the shock forces and velocities response surface models are established to analyze the sensitivities of shock force and velocity to the shock damping characteristics.

A fatigue crack growth model is adopted in this paper to investigate the fatigue lives of resistance spot welds in square-cup and lap-shear specimens of dual phase, low carbon and high strength steels under cyclic loading conditions. The fatigue crack growth model is based on the global stress intensity factor solutions for main cracks, the local stress intensity factor solutions for kinked cracks as functions of the kink length, the experimentally determined kink angles, and the Paris law for kinked crack propagation. The predicted fatigue lives based on the fatigue crack growth model are then compared with the experimental data. The results indicate that the fatigue life predictions based on the fatigue crack growth model are in agreement with or lower than the experimental results.

In the development of several outside mirror designs for vehicles, a high frequency noise (whistling) phenomenon was experienced. First impression was that this might be due to another source on the vehicle (such as water management channels) or a cavity noise; however, upon further investigation the source was found to be the mirror housing. This “laminar whistle” is related to the separation of a laminar boundary layer near the trailing edges of the mirror housing. When there is a free stream impingement on the mirror housing, the boundary layer starts out as laminar, but as the boundary layer travels from the impingement point, distance, speed, and roughness combine to trigger the transition turbulent. However, when the transition is not complete, pressure fluctuations can cause rapidly changing flow patterns that sound like a whistle to the observer. Because the laminar boundary layer has very little energy, it does not allow the flow to stay attached on curved surfaces.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of stamping process on oil canning and dent resistance performances of an automotive roof panel. Finite element analysis of stamping processes was carried out using LS-Dyna to obtain thickness and plastic strain distributions under various forming conditions. The forming results were mapped onto the roof model by an in-house developed mapping code. A displacement control approach using an implicit FEM code ABAQUS/Standard was employed for oil canning and denting analysis. An Auto/Steel Partnership Standardized Test Procedure for Dent Resistance was employed to establish the analysis model and to determine the dent and oil canning loads. The results indicate that stamping has a positive effect on dent resistance and a negative effect on oil canning performance. As forming strains increase, dent resistance increases while the oil canning load decreases.

Coordinate measurement gages dominate in the area of dimensional control and variation reduction of automotive body assembly processes. However, coordinate measurement gages do not have the capability to track certain measured features. This incapability introduces inherent measurement error created by part (feature) mislocation in constrained non-measured directions. This inherent measurement error weakens the methods used for process control and variation reduction. In this paper, a principle of measurement uncertainty is developed in order to estimate the measurement error caused by this deficiency. The developed principle describes measurement error, which is independent of any other error related to the mechanical or optical coordinate measurement machines (CMMs, OCMMs). Additionally, an error map determined by the measurement uncertainty principle is created for error compensation.

The problem of predicting the quality of weld is critical to manufacturing. A great deal of data is collected under multiple conditions to predict the quality. The data generated at Daimler Chrysler has been used to develop a model based on grammatical evolution. Grammatical Evolution Technique is based on Genetic Algorithms and generates rules from the data which fit the data. This paper describes the development of a software tool that enables the user to choose input variables such as the metal types of top and bottom layers and their thickness, intensity and speed of laser beam, to generate a three dimensional map showing weld quality. A 3D weld quality surface can be generated in response to any of the two input variables picked from the set of defining input parameters. This tool will enable the user to pick the right set of input conditions to get an optimal weld quality. The tool is developed in Matlab with Graphical User Interface for the ease of operation.

It is commonly known that in an automotive manufacturing assembly line several workers perform either a common task or a number of different tasks simultaneously, and there is a need to represent such a multi-worker operation realistically in a digital environment. In the past years, most digital human modeling applications were limited only in a single worker case. This paper presents how to simulate multi-worker operations in a digital workcell. To establish an effective communication and interaction between the mannequins, some existing commercial software package has provided a digital input/output mechanism. The motion for each mannequin is often programmed independently, but can be interrupted anytime by the other digital human models or devices via a communication channel.

Advanced material modeling was conducted to describe the thermal-mechanical behavior of Boron Steel during hot stamping, a process in which blanks at 900 °C are formed and quenched between cold dies. Plastic deformation, thermal dilatation and phase transformation were incorporated in the constitutive model and a user-defined subroutine was developed to interface with LS-DYNA. Simulation was conducted on the hot stamping process of a door intrusion beam to gain insight into the physics of the process. Results showed significant influence of the thermal cycle on final product. It was also demonstrated that the program developed can be used as an early feasibility tool to determine baseline processing parameters and to detect potential defects in products without physical prototyping.

Buffeting is a wind noise of high intensity and low frequency in a moving vehicle when a window or sunroof is open and this noise makes people in the passenger compartment very uncomfortable. In this paper, side window buffeting was simulated for a typical SUV using the commercial CFD software Fluent 6.0. Buffeting frequency and intensity were predicted in the simulations and compared with the corresponding experimental wind tunnel measurement. Furthermore, the effects of several parameters on buffeting frequency and intensity were also studied. These parameters include vehicle speed, yaw angle, sensor location and volume of the passenger compartment. Various configurations of side window opening were considered. The effects of mesh size and air compressibility on buffeting were also evaluated. The simulation results for some baseline configurations match the corresponding experimental data fairly well.

Recently, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was applied to investigate blockage (or velocity) corrections using the nozzle method for a climatic wind tunnel (CWT) test environment (SAE 2003-01-0936). The study included two blockage corrections to the nozzle method reference velocity: vehicle frontal velocity and vehicle upper surface pressure trace. These methods resulted in well correlated predictions between the open road and CWT flow conditions. These CFD predicted blockage corrections are experimentally verified in a climatic wind tunnel in this study. A non-intrusive method applying particle image velocimetry is applied to acquire the velocity field in front of the test vehicle. The experimental data verifies the blockage correction predictions derived from the previous CFD work.