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Low interior noise levels in combination with a comfortable sound is an important task for passenger cars. Due to the reduction of many noise sources over the last decades, nowadays tire-road noise has become one of the dominant sources for the interior noise. Especially for manufactures of luxury cars, the reduction of tire-road noise is a big challenge and therefore a central part of NVH development. The knowledge of the noise transmission behavior based on the characteristics of the relevant sources is a fundamental of a modern NVH - development process. For tire-road noise the source characteristics can be described by wheel forces and radiated airborne noise. In combination with the related vehicle transfer functions it is possible to describe the noise transmission behavior in detail. A method for estimating wheel forces and radiated airborne noise is presented.

Aero-vibro-acoustic prediction of interior noise associated with exterior flow requires accurate predictions of both fluctuating surface pressures across the exterior of a vehicle and efficient models of the vibro-acoustic transmission of these surface pressures to the interior of a vehicle. The simulation strategy used in this paper combines both CFD and vibro-acoustic methods. An accurate excitation field (which accounts for both hydrodynamic and acoustic pressure fluctuations) is calculated with a hybrid CAA approach based on an incompressible unsteady flow field with an additional acoustic wave equation. To obtain the interior noise level at the driver's ears a vibro-acoustic model is used to calculate the response of the structure and interior cavities. The aero-vibro-acoustic simulation strategy is demonstrated for a Mercedes-Benz S-class and the predictions are compared to experimental wind tunnel measurements.

A powerful and efficient turbocharger turbine benefits the engine in many aspects, such as better transient response, lower NOx emissions and better fuel economy. The turbine performance can be further improved by employing secondary flow injection through an injector over the shroud section. A secondary flow injection system can be integrated with a conventional turbine without affecting its original design parameters, including the rotor, volute, and back disk. In this study, a secondary flow injection system has been developed to fit for an asymmetric twin-scroll turbocharger turbine, which was designed for a 6-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine, aiming at improving the vehicle’s performance at 1100 rpm under full-loading conditions. The shape of the flow injector is similar to a single-entry volute but can produce the flow angle in both circumferential and meridional directions when the flow leaves the injector and enters the shroud cavity.

Aerodynamic design and thermal management are some of the most important tasks when developing new concepts for the flow around tractor-trailers. Today, both experimental and numerical studies are an integral part of the aerodynamic and thermal design processes. A variety of studies have been conducted how the aerodynamic design reduces the drag coefficient for fuel efficiency as well as for the construction of radiators to provide cooling on tractor-trailers. However, only a few studies cover the combined effect of the aerodynamic and thermal design on the air temperature of the under hood flow [8, 13, 16, 17, 20]. The objective of this study is to analyze the heat transfer through forced convection for a scaled Cab-over-Engine (CoE) tractor-trailer model with under hood flow. Different design concepts are compared to provide low under hood air temperature and efficient cooling of the sub components.

As for passenger cars, the overall noise and vibration comfort in commercial trucks and busses becomes an increasingly important sales argument. In order to effectively reduce the noise and vibration levels it is required to identify possible NVH issues at an early stage in the vehicle development process. For this reason a so-called “Virtual Transfer Path Analysis” (VTPA) method has been implemented which combines the results obtained from the conventional multi-body simulation and finite element method approaches. The resulting VTPA tool enables Daimler Trucks to systematically investigate and predict the complex interaction between powertrain excitation and the resulting vehicle response well before hardware prototypes become available. An overview of the theory is presented as well as the practical application and outcome of the technique applied in a past product development.

Beginning in 2010, Daimler's well-known Diesel Sprinter van has to fulfill the new and clearly tighter NOx emission standards of NAFTA10 (EPA, CARB). This requires an integrated approach of further engine optimizations and the implementation of an innovative exhaust aftertreatment technology. The goal was to develop an overall concept which meets simultaneously the tightened emission standards (including OBD limits) and the increasing customer demands of more power and torque without losing the high fuel efficiency of the small and highly efficient 3-liter V6 diesel engine OM642, which already has been installed in the NAFTA07 Sprinter. In the early stages of the concept phase, the most appropriate NOx aftertreatment technology and certification form (engine or vehicle) had to be selected for this specific vehicle class in the van segment with enhanced requirements to durability, economical efficiency and specific driving behavior.

The economic challenges and environmental imperatives facing the trucking and automobile industries today all point to a pressing need to improve fuel efficiency. Due to increasing volatility of fuel supplies, prices and a growing interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, fuel efficiency has taken on new urgency. In the long-haul trucking industry this is especially important given the fact that fuel accounts for a significant share of fleet operating costs. To this end Daimler and NAVTEQ have developed a system to improve fuel economy and reduce CO₂ emissions through the integration of digital map data into Advanced Driver Assistance Systems or ADAS. Digital road map attributes, especially road slope have been demonstrated to enable powertrain controls to anticipate road inclination changes and use this information to predictively enhance load management optimization versus the reactive approach afforded by current technology.

Brake system development and testing is spread over vehicle manufacturers, system and component suppliers. Test equipment from different sources, even resulting from different technology generations, different data analysis and report tools - comprising different and sometimes undocumented algorithms - lead to a difficult exchange and analysis of test results and, at the same time, contributes to unwanted test variability. Other studies regarding the test variability brought up that only a unified and unambiguous data format will allow a meaningful and comparative evaluation of these data and only standardization will reveal the actual reasons of test variability. The text at hand illustrates that a substantial part of test variability is caused by a misinterpretation of data and/or by the application of different algorithms.

A cooperation of several research partners supported by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education proposes a new active matrix LED light source. A multi pixel flip chip LED array is directly mounted to an active driver IC. A total of 1024 pixel can be individually addressed through a serial data bus. Several of these units are integrated in a prototype headlamp to enable advanced light distribution patterns in an evaluation vehicle.

In order to offer a wide range of driving experiences to their customers, original equipment manufacturers implement different driving programs. The driver is capable of manually switching between these programs which alter drivability parameters in the engine control unit. As a result, acceleration forces and gradients are modified, changing the perceived driving experience. Nowadays, drivability is calibrated iteratively through road testing. Hence, the resulting set of parameters incorporated within the engine control unit is strongly dependent on the individual sentiments and decisions of the test engineers. It is shown, that implementing a set of objective criteria offers a way to reduce the influences of personal preferences and sentiments in the drivability calibration process. In combination with the expertise of the test engineers, the desired vehicle behavior can be formalized into a transient set point sequence to give final shape to the acceleration behavior.

The continuously integration of electrics and electronics (EE) in the last decades is one of the main key drivers for innovation and business success of the Automotive OEMs. This is also applicable for truck manufacturers. On the other side factors like the rising vehicle complexity, number of variants and the warranty costs for EE issues are increasing the pressure on the engineering teams responsible for the mechatronic systems. To address these issues one of the key activities in the European market (focus on Germany) during the last decade was to introduce industry-wide standards for the data transfer of wiring harness data between OEM and harness supplier. In this paper the benefits and technical background of using the standards KBL and KOMP formats within the MB-Trucks brand will be presented. Moreover the role of the Information Technology (IT) will be explained in detail.

In order to reduce fuel consumption in Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles, effective distribution of power demand between Fuel Cell and Battery is required. Energy management strategies can improve fuel economy by meeting power demand efficiently. This paper explains development of various energy management strategies for Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle with Lithium Ion Battery. Drive cycles used for optimization and analysis of the strategies are New European Drive cycles (NEDC), Japanese Drive cycles (JAP1015), City Drive cycles, Highway Drive cycles (FHDS) and Federal Urban Drive cycles (FUDS). All Fuel consumption and ageing calculations are done using backward model implemented in MATLAB/SIMULINK.

In this paper experimental results of a medium duty single cylinder research engine with spark ignition are presented. The engine was operated with stoichiometric natural gas combustion and additional charge dilution by means of external and cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). The first part of this work considers the benefits of cooled EGR on thermo-mechanical stress of the engine including exhaust gas temperature, cylinder head temperature, and knock behaviour. This is followed by the analysis of the influence of cooled EGR on the heat release rate. In this context the impact of fuel gas composition is also under investigation. The influence of increasing EGR on fuel efficiency, which is caused by a changed combustion process due to higher fractions of inert gases, is shown in this section. By application of different pistons a relationship between the piston bowl geometry and the flame propagation has been demonstrated.

The ASSESS project is a European Commission co-funded project that aimed to develop harmonized and standardized assessment procedures for collision mitigation and avoidance systems. ASSESS was one of the first European projects which dealt in depth with the concept of integrated safety, defining methodologies to analyse vehicle safety from a global point of view. As such, the developed procedures included driver behaviour evaluation, pre-crash and crash system performance evaluation and socio-economic assessment. The activities performed for the crash evaluation focussed on the influence of braking manoeuvres in occupant positioning through dynamic braking manoeuvres with real occupants and Madymo and LS-Dyna simulations. The assessment of the passive safety protection level according to the results of the influence of the active systems is based on sled testing and full vehicle testing.

A wide variety of applications such as driver assistant and energy management systems are researched and developed in virtual test environments. The safe testing of the applications in early stages is based on parameterizable and reproducible simulations of different driving scenarios. One possibility is modeling the microscopic driving behavior to simulate the longitudinal vehicle dynamics of individual vehicles. The currently used driver models are characterized by a conflict regarding comprehensibility, accuracy and calibration effort. Due to the importance for further analyses this conflict of interests is addressed by the presentation of a new microscopic driver model in this paper. The proposed driver model stores measured driving behaviors with its statistical distributions in maps. Thereby, the driving task is divided into free flow, braking in front of stops and following vehicles ahead. This makes it possible to display the driving behavior in its entirety.

The driving comfort influences the customer purchase decision; hence it is an important aspect for the vehicle development. To better quantify the comfort level and reduce the experiment costs in the development process, the subjective comfort assessment by test drivers is nowadays more and more replaced by the objective comfort evaluation. Hereby the vibration comfort is described by scalar objective characteristic parameters that correlate with the subjective assessments. The correlation analysis requires the assessments and measurements at different vehicle vibration. To determine the objective parameters regarding the powertrain excitations, most experiments in the previous studies were carried out in several test vehicles with different powertrain units.

In the next 20 years the share of small electric vehicles (SEVs) will increase especially in urban areas. SEVs show distinctive design differences compared to traditional vehicles. Thus the consequences of impacts of SEVs with vulnerable road users (VRUs) and other vehicles will be different from traditional collisions. No assessment concerning vehicle safety is defined for vehicles within European L7e category currently. Focus of the elaborated methodology is to define appropriate test scenarios for this vehicle category to be used within a virtual tool chain. A virtual tool chain has to be defined for the realization of a guideline of virtual certification. The derivation and development of new test conditions for SEVs are described and are the main focus of this work. As key methodology a prospective methodical analysis under consideration of future aspects like pre-crash safety systems is applied.

The reduction of fuel consumption as well as the rising demands of customers regarding a vehicle’s driving dynamic and the legislator’s continually rising demands are a current issue in vehicle development. Hybrid vehicles offer a possibility to rise to this challenge. Realistic driving cycles are of utmost importance for the calibration of a hybrid vehicle’s operational strategy. Deriving replacement speed cycles from extensive customer data sets seems to be an approach for solving these problems. The contribution at hand describes the derivation of replacement cycles by using stochastic models, probabilistic (weighted) drawings and a combinatorial optimisation. The novelty value is that the characteristic influences of all drivers are being considered in the generation due to the stochastic modelling.

The increasing functionality and complexity of future electric/electronic architectures requires efficient methods and tools to support design decisions, which are taken in early development phases 6. For the past four years, a holistic approach for architecture development has been established at Mercedes-Benz Cars R&D department. At its core is a seamless design flow, including the conception, the analysis and the documentation for electric/electronic architectures. One of the actual challenges in the design of electric/electronic architectures concerns communication behavior and network topologies. The increasing data exchange between the ECUs creates high requirements for the networks. With the introduction of FlexRay 21 and Ethernet the automotive network architecture become a lot more heterogeneous. Especially gateways must fulfill many new requirements to handle the strict periodic schedule of FlexRay and the partly event-triggered communication on CAN-busses 23.