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The selection and tuning of the Fuel Injection System (FIS) are among the most critical tasks for the automotive diesel engine design engineers. In fact, the injection strongly affects the combustion phenomena through which controlling a wide range of related issues such as pollutant emissions, combustion noise and fuel efficiency becomes feasible. In the scope of the engine design optimization, the simulation is an efficient tool in order to both predict the key performance parameters of the FIS, and to reduce the amount of experiments needed to reach the final product configuration. In this work a complete characterization of a solenoid ballistic injector for a Light-Duty Common Rail system was therefore implemented in a commercially available one-dimensional computational software called GT-SUITE. The main phenomena governing the injector operation were simulated by means of three sub-models (electro-magnetic, hydraulic and mechanical).

Presented in the paper is a comprehensive analysis for floating piston pin. It is more challenging because it is a special type of journal bearing where the rotation of the journal is coupled with the friction between the journal and the bearing. In this analysis, the multi-degree freedom mass-conserving mixed-EHD equations are solved to determine the coupled pin rotation and friction. Other bearing characteristics, such as minimum film thickness, pin secondary motions in both connecting-rod small-end bearing and piston pin-boss bearing, power loss etc are also determined. The mechanism for floating pin to have better scuffing resistance is discovered. The theoretical and numerical model is implemented in the GM internal software FLARE (Friction and Lubrication Analysis for Reciprocating Engines).

As the new features for driver assistance and active safety systems are growing rapidly in vehicles, the simulation within a virtual environment has become a necessity. The current active safety system consists of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) which are coupled to camera and radar sensors. Two methods of implementation exists, integrated sensors with control modules or separation of sensors form control modules. The subsystem integration testing poses new challenges for virtual environment for simulation of active safety features. The comprehensive simulation environment for integration testing consists of chassis controls, powertrain, driver assistance, body and displays controllers. Additional complexity in the system is the serial communication strategy. Multiple communication protocols such as GMLAN, LIN, standard CAN, and Flexray could be present within the same vehicle topology.

The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership-Vehicle Safety Communications 2 (CAMP-VSC2) Consortium (Ford, General Motors, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, and Toyota) initiated, in December 2006, a three-year collaborative effort in the area of wireless-based safety applications under the Vehicle Safety Communications-Applications (VSC-A) Project. The VSC-A Project developed and tested Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications-based safety systems to determine if Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) at 5.9 GHz, in combination with vehicle positioning, would improve upon autonomous vehicle-based safety systems and/or enable new communications-based safety applications.

It is well known that backpressure is one of the important parameters to be minimised during the exhaust system development. Unfortunately, during the first phases of an engineering process of a new engine, engine prototypes are not available yet. Due to this the exhaust system backpressure is generally evaluated using simulation software, and/or measuring the backpressure by a flow rig test at room temperature. Goal of this paper is to compare exhaust backpressure results obtained respectively: i) at the room temperature flow rig; ii) at the engine dyno bench; iii) by simulation with one of the most common 1D fluidodynamics simulation tool (Gt-Power). A correlation of the three different techniques is presented.

In the powertrain technology, designers must be careful on oil pan design in order to obtain the best noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance. This is a great issue for the automotive design because they affect the passengers' comfort. In order to reduce vibration and radiated noise in powertrain assembly, oil pan is one of the most critical components. The high stiffness of the oil pan permits to move up the natural modes of the component and, as a consequence, reduce the sound emission of the component itself. In addition, the optimized shape of the component allows the increase of natural frequency values of the engine assembly. The aim of this study is the development of a methodology to increase the oil pan stiffness starting from a sketch of the component and adding material where it is needed. The methodology is tested on a series of different models: they have the same geometry but different materials.

The usage of multi-body dynamics tools for the prediction of vehicle system/sub-system loads, has significantly reduced the need to measure vehicle loads at proving grounds. The success of these tools is limited by the quality of the digital representations being used to simulate the physical test roads. The development of these digital roads is not a trivial task due to the large quantity of data and processing required. In the end, the files must be manageable in size, have a globally common format, and be simulation-friendly. The authors present a methodology for the development of high quality 3-dimensional (3-D) digital proving ground profiles. These profiles will be used in conjunction with a multi-body dynamics software package (ADAMS) and the FTire™ model. The authors present a case study below.

The imperative to get to the market faster with new and better products, has determined all automotive OEM to rethink their product development cycle, and, as a result, many hardware based processes were replaced and/or augmented with virtual, software based ones. However, the virtualization itself does not guaranties better and faster products. In the area of vehicle dynamics, we concentrate on improving the multi-body model development process, facilitating comprehensive virtual testing, and verifying the robustness of the design. The authors present a highly flexible and efficient environment that encourages, enforces, and facilitates model sharing, reusing of components, and parallelization of vehicle dynamics simulations, developed on top of an existing commercial off-the-shelf engineering software application.

This paper presents Telematics Battery Monitoring (TBM). TBM is a multi-faceted approach of collecting and analyzing electric power and vehicle data used to ultimately determine battery state of charge (SOC) and battery state of health (SOH) in both pre- and post-sale environments. Traditional methods of battery SOC analysis include labor intensive processes such as going out to the site of individual vehicle(s), gaining access to the vehicle battery, and then after the vehicle electrical system obtains its quiescent current level, performing a battery voltage check. This time-consuming manual method can practically only cover a small percentage of the vehicle population. In using the vehicle communication capabilities of Telematics, electric power and vehicle data are downloaded, compiled, and post-processed using decision-making software tools.

Recent trends in the automotive industry show growing demands for the introduction of new in-vehicle features (e.g., smart-phone integration, adaptive cruise control, etc.) at increasing rates and with reduced time-to-market. New technological developments (e.g., in-vehicle Ethernet, multi-core technologies, AUTOSAR standardized software architectures, smart video and radar sensors, etc.) provide opportunities as well as challenges to automotive designers for introducing and implementing new features at lower costs, and with increased safety and security. As a result, the design of Electrical/Electronic (E/E) architectures is becoming increasingly challenging as several hardware resources are needed. In our earlier work, we have provided top-level definitions for three relevant metrics that can be used to evaluate E/E architecture alternatives in the early stages of the design process: flexibility, scalability and expandability.

Digital human models (DHM) are now widely used to assess worker tasks as part of manufacturing simulation. With current DHM software, the simulation engineer or ergonomist usually makes a manual estimate of the likely worker standing location with respect to the work task. In a small number of cases, the worker standing location is determined through physical testing with one or a few workers. Motion capture technology is sometimes used to aid in quantitative analysis of the resulting posture. Previous research has demonstrated the sensitivity of work task assessment using DHM to the accuracy of the posture prediction. This paper expands on that work by demonstrating the need for a method and model to accurately predict worker standing location. The effect of standing location on work task posture and the resulting assessment is documented through three case studies using the Siemens Jack DHM software.

This paper deals with the development of a Hood Slam Process Automator (PA) to automate the pre-processing tasks of the virtual slam assessment with non-linear Nastran Transient Sol. 129 on all types of hoods. The slam analysis generally consumes a lot of analyst's time for building the slam models, typically six hours and is very tedious and has the potential for errors. The Hood Slam PA will automatically create and perform slam analysis pre-processing tasks within HyperMesh software such as creating latch striker interface, creating seals and bumpers with CBUSH1D elements, assigning transient slam speed to the hood and will finally generate the Nastran non-linear transient (Sol.129) hood slam analysis input files. The ready to run analysis input files will be submitted to the Nastran solver and the analysis results will then be post processed using HyperView software.

Given the fast changing market demands, the growing complexity of features, the shorter time to market, and the design/development constraints, the need for efficient and effective verification and validation methods are becoming critical for vehicle manufacturers and suppliers. One such example is fault-tree analysis. While fault-tree analysis is an important hazard analysis/verification activity, the current process of translating design details (e.g., system level and software level) is manual. Current experience indicates that fault tree analysis involves both creative deductive thinking and more mechanical steps, which typically involve instantiating gates and events in fault trees following fixed patterns. Specifically for software fault tree analysis, a number of the development steps typically involve instantiating fixed patterns of gates and events based upon the structure of the code. In this work, we investigate a methodology to translate software programs to fault trees.

In quasi-static tension and compression tests of thermoplastics, full-field strain distribution on the gage section of the specimen can be captured using the two-dimensional digital image correlation method. By loading the test specimens made of a talc-filled and impact-modified polypropylene up to tensile failure and large compressive strains, this study has revealed that inhomogeneous deformation within the gage section occurs quite early for both test types. This leads to the challenge of characterizing the mechanical properties - some mechanical properties such as stress-strain relationship and fracture strain could depend on the measured section length and location. To study this problem, the true stress versus true strain curves determined locally in different regions within the gage length are compared.

Automotive HW/SW architectures are becoming increasingly complex to support the deployment of new safety, comfort, and energy-efficiency features. Such architectures include several software tasks (100+), messages (1000+), computational and communication resources (70+ CPUs, 10+ buses), and (smart) sensors and actuators (20+). To cope with the increasing system complexity at lowest development and product costs, highest safety, and fastest time to market, model-based rapid-prototyping development processes are essential. The processes, coupled with optimization steps aimed at reducing the number of software and hardware resources while satisfying the safety requirements, enable reduction of the system complexity and ease downstream testing/validation efforts. This paper describes a novel model-based design exploration and optimization process for the deployment of a set of software tasks on a dual-processor control module implementing a fail-safe strategy.

Vehicle development typically occurs by independently documenting requirements for individual subsystems, then packaging these subsystems into the vehicle and testing the feature operation at a higher level, across multiple subsystems. Many times, this independent development process results in integration problems at the vehicle level, such as incomplete feature execution, unexpected operation and information disconnects. The development team is left to debug and create inefficient patches at the vehicle level due to time constraints and / or planned release dates. Without architecting solutions at the feature level, miscommunication of expected feature operation leads to wasted time, re-work and customer dissatisfaction. While the development of vehicle level technical specifications provide feature expectations at the vehicle level, they do not solve the problem of how this operation is to be applied across multiple systems.

GM has recently developed two kinds of vehicle electrification architectures. First is VOLTec, a heavy electrification architecture, and second is eAssist, a light electrification architecture. An overview, of IGBT power modules & inverters used in VOLTec and eAssist, is presented. Alternative power modules from few cooperative suppliers are also described in a benchmarking study using key metrics. Inverter test set up, procedure and instrumentation used in GM Power Electronics Development Lab, Milford are described. GM electrification journey depends on Power Electronics lab' passive test benches; double pulse tester, inductive resistive load bench and active emulator test cell without electric machines. Such test benches are preferred before dyne test cells are used for inverter software/hardware integration and motor durability tests cycles. Specific test results are presented.

The vehicle sideslip angle is one of the most important variables for evaluating vehicle dynamics. The potential value of such a variable for obtaining significant improvements over current stability control systems is widely recognized. However, its direct measurement requires the use of complex and expensive devices which cannot be used in production cars. Large research efforts has been devoted to the problem of estimating the sideslip angle from other variables currently measured by standard Electronic Stability Control (ESC) sensors. However, at the best of author's knowledge, until now no application to production cars is known. In this paper, a new sideslip angle estimation technology is presented.

Time-resolved mass injection rates of an outward opening piezo-actuated and a solenoid actuated multi-hole GDI injector were measured to investigate (1) the influence of both hardware and software settings and (2) the influence on the injection rates from a wide range of operational parameters and (3) discuss limitations and issues with this measurement technique. The varied operating parameters were fuel pressure, back-pressure, electrical pulse width, single/double injection and injection frequency. The varied hardware/software parameters were injector protrusion, upstream fuel pressure condition and the cut-off frequency of the software's low-pass filter. Signal quality was found to be dependent on both hardware and software settings, especially the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter. Measurements with high signal quality were not possible for back-pressures lower than 0.5 MPa.

Maximizing reuse of existing software assets is a common goal for companies as they move to new projects and products. Typically, reuse is complicated by changes to the context in which the software executes; the software architecture. As in all development areas, software architects are seeking continuous improvement to their designs either through internal innovation or established external standards. However, changes to the software architecture (e.g. interfaces, services, scheduling etc.) can prove to be a driver of fundamental, large-scale change to software if reuse strategies are not planned into the product line. This paper describes a reuse strategy that maximizes the preservation of existing assets while focusing effort on the development of transformation rules that generate software targeting a new architectural context.