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Water accumulating on a vehicle's wind screen, driven over the A-pillar by a combination of aerodynamic forces and the action of the windscreen wipers, can be a significant impediment to driver vision. Surface water film, or streams, persisting in key vision areas of the side glass can impair the drivers' ability to see clearly through to the door mirror, and laterally onto junctions. Common countermeasures include: water management channels and hydrophobic glass coatings. Water management channels have both design and wind noise implications. Hydrophobic coatings entail significant cost. In order to manage this design optimisation issue a water film and wiper effect model has been developed in collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover, extending the capabilities of the PowerFLOW CFD software. This is complimented by a wind-tunnel based test method for development and validation. The paper presents the progress made to date.

With the stringent China6 legislation implementation in 2020, Gasoline Particulate Filters (GPF) are widely applied to control Particulate Number (PN), THC, CO, and NOx emissions from gasoline engines. The typical GPF product in the market is usually coated with a Pd/Rh three-way catalyst (TWC) layer. In this work, a novel and cost-effective GPF was achieved through Pd substitution with lower price of Pt in a novel Pt/Rh coating technology. This novel Pt/Rh GPF was evaluated for back pressure under clean and soot loaded conditions, PN Filtration efficiency and TWC activity. When compared with the commercial product of Pd/Rh GPF, the novel Pt/Rh GPF had 15% lower clean BP contribution, 25% lower back pressure with 2 g/L soot loading, while achieving equivalent PN filtration efficiency. The TWC activity of this novel Pt/Rh GPF was investigated after multiple aging including Four Mode bench aging and 1050 °C oven aging.

To meet corporate CO2 emission targets polymer composites are being explored for light-weighting vehicle applications. Operational requirements may demand that such materials function above glass transition temperatures or heat deflection points. Intumescent coatings are traditionally used in construction to protect steelwork during fire. This paper presents a novel experimental investigation of two intumescent technologies to thermally protect a reinforced polyamide, for use as a semi-structural vehicle component. Coatings were assessed against the thermal requirement to withstand 500°C for 10 minutes. The differences in performance observed between water and epoxy based coatings as well as when an insulation layer was introduced are reported. Ultimate Tensile Stress (UTS) and modulus values were obtained at −40°C, ambient, and 85°C for uncoated specimens before and after thermal cycling.

Predicting Exterior Water Management is important for developing vehicles that meet customer expectations in adverse weather. Fluid film methods, with Lagrangian tracking, can provide spray and surface water simulations for complex vehicle geometries in on-road conditions. To cope with this complexity and provide practical engineering simulations, such methods rely on empirical sub-models to predict phenomena such as the film stripping from the surface. Experimental data to develop and validate such models is difficult to obtain therefore here a high-fidelity Coupled Level-set Volume of Fluid (CLSVOF) simulation is carried out. CLSVOF resolves the interface of the liquid in three dimensions; allowing direct simulation of film behaviour and interaction with the surrounding air. This is used to simulate a simplified wing-mirror, with air flow, on which water is introduced.