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Vehicle hood styling has significant influence on headform kinematics in assessment tests of pedestrian impact protection performance. Pedestrian headform kinematics on vehicle front-end models with different hood styling characteristics is analyzed based on finite element modeling. More elevated feature lines near hood boundary and the following continuous hood surface towards fender will result in a different headform motion. It can lead to larger deformation space, more rotation and earlier rebound of the headform impactor, which will benefit the head impact protection performance. In addition, hood geometry characteristics such as hood angle and curvature have effects on structural stiffness. Therefore, inclusion of considerations on pedestrian head protection into the vehicle hood styling design stage may lead to a more effective and efficient engineering design process on headform impact analysis.

As one of the most important auto-body moving parts, door hinge is the key point of door design and its accessories arrangement, also the premise of the door kinematic analysis. We proposed an effective layout procedure for door hinge and developed an intelligent system on CATIA CAA platform to execute it. One toolbar and five function modules are constructed - Axis Arrangement, Section, Parting Line, Kinematic, Hinge Database. This system integrated geometrical algorithms, automatically calculate the minimum clearances between doors, fender and hinges on sections to judge if the layout is feasible. As the sizes of the clearances are set to 0s, the feasible layout regions and extreme start/end points are shown in parts window, which help the engineer to check the parting line and design a new one. Our system successfully implemented the functions of five modules for the layout of door hinge axis and parting line based on a door hinge database.

The conventional hood with single material and stiffener structural form conceals some limitations on pedestrian protection and lightweight, not satisfying the requirements of structural strength, pedestrian protection and lightweight contradictory with each other at the same time. In this paper, a novel type hood is proposed to develop sandwich structure using architected cellular material with negative Poisson's ratio (NPR) configuration based on the decoupling thought of structural strength and energy absorption. Core-layer aluminum alloy material with NPR is used to meet the requirement of impact energy absorption, inner and outer skin using carbon fiber is selected to achieve high structural stiffness needed. This paper starts from the relations between geometric parameters of core-layer architected cellular material and mechanical properties, on this basis, the optimal geometric parameters can be expected using the multiobjective optimization method.

Magneto-rhelological(MR) dampers are devices that use rheological fluids to modify the mechanical properties of fluid absorber. The mechanical simplicity, high dynamic range, large force capacity, lower power requirements, robustness and safe manner of operation have made MR dampers attractive devices for semi-active real-time control in civil, aerospace and automotive applications. Landing gear is one of the most essential components of the aircraft, which plays an extreme important role in preventing the airframe from vibration and excessive impact forces, improving passenger comfortable characteristics and increasing aircraft flight safety. In this paper, the semi-active system used in landing gear damping controller design, simulation, and the vibration test-bed are discussed and researched. The MR dampers employed in landing gear system were designed, manufactured and characterized as available semi-active actuators.

The front rail, as one main energy absorption component of vehicle front structures, should present steady progressive collapse along its axis and avoid bending collapse during the front oblique impact, but when the angle of loading direction is larger than some critical angle, it will appear bending collapse causing reduced capability of crash energy absorption. This paper is concerned with crashworthiness design of the front rail on a vehicle chassis frame structure considering uncertain crash directions. The objective is to improve the crash direction adaptability of the front rail, without deteriorating the vehicle's crashworthiness performance. Magic Cube (MQ) approach, a systematic design approach, is conducted to analyze the design problem. By applying Space Decomposition of MQ, an equivalent model of the vehicle chassis frame is generated, which simplifies the design problem.

The increasing demand for lightweight design of the whole vehicle has raised critical weight reduction targets for crash components such as front rails without deteriorating their crash performances. To this end the last few years have witnessed a huge growth in vehicle body structures featuring hybrid materials including steel and aluminum alloys. In this work, a type of tapered tailor-welded tube (TTWT) made of steel and aluminum alloy hybrid materials was proposed to maximize the specific energy absorption (SEA) and to minimize the peak crushing force (PCF) in an oblique crash scenario. The hybrid tube was found to be more robust than the single material tubes under oblique impacts using validated finite element (FE) models. Compared with the aluminum alloy tube and the steel tube, the hybrid tube can increase the SEA by 46.3% and 86.7%, respectively, under an impact angle of 30°.

In order to solve the abnormal vibration of a light bus, order tracking analysis of finite element simulation and road test was made to identify the vibration source, finding that the rotation angular frequency of the wheels and the first two natural frequency of the body structure overlaps, resonance occurring which lead to increased vibration. To stagger the first two natural frequency and excitation frequency of the body, thickness of sheet metal and skeleton of the body-in-white were chosen as the design variables, rise of the first two natural frequency of the body-in-white as the optimization objective, optimal design and sensitivity analysis of the body-in-white was carried out with the modal analysis theory. Combining with the modal sensitivity and mass sensitivity of sheet metal and skeleton, the optimum design was achieved and tests analysis was conducted.

It aims to study the unsteady flow characteristic of the side-view mirror wake field, and reduce the wind noise by means of unsteady flow control. In this paper, the PIV test in a wind tunnel is used to capture the unsteady flow in the wake field of the side-view mirror, which is used to verify the accuracy of the steady simulation method with RANS after being averaged. Then LES turbulence model is used to obtain the wind noise, and the unsteady flow characteristic like vortex shedding of the side-view mirror is studied. The results show that, in the wake of the side-view mirror, there is a vortex pair similar to Karman Vortex Street. In both horizontal and vertical sections, these two vortexes are respectively separated from the upper and lower edges of the side-view mirror. Accompanied by a significantly uncertain periodic shedding, they continue to extend back until dissipating.

This paper studies a multi-objective optimization design of interior noise for an automotive body. An acoustic-structure coupled model with materials and properties was established to predict the interior noise based on a passenger car. Moreover, three kinds of approximation models related damping thickness and the root mean square of the driver’s ear sound pressure level were established through Latin hypercube method and the corresponding experiments. The prediction accuracy was analyzed and compared for the approximate response surface model, Kriging model and Radial Basis Function neural network model. On this basis, multi-objective optimization of the vehicle interior noise was conducted by using NSGA-II. According to the optimization results, the damping composite structure was applied on the car body structure. Then, the comparison of sound pressure level response at driver’s ear location before and after optimization was performed at speed of 60 km/h on a smooth road.

In vehicle accident, the bumper beam generally requires high stiffness for sufficient survival space for occupants while it may cause serious pedestrian lower extremity injuries. The aim of this study is to promote an aluminum-steel hybrid material double-hat bumper to meet the comprehensive requirements. The hybrid bumper is designed to improve the frontal crash and pedestrian protection performances in collision accidents. Finite element (FE) models of the hybrid bumper was built, validated, and integrated into an automotive model. The Fixed Deformable Barrier (FDB) and Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) legform model were used to obtain the vehicle crashworthiness and pedestrian lower leg injury indicators. Numerical results showed that the hybrid bumper had a great potential for crashworthiness performance and pedestrian protection characteristics. Based on this, a multi-objective optimization design (MOD) was performed to search the optimal geometric parameters.

Lane detection and tracking play a key role in autonomous driving, not only in the LKA System but help estimate the pose of the vehicle. While there has been significant development in recent years, traditional outdoor SLAM algorithms still struggle to provide reliable information in challenging dynamic environments such as lack of roadside landscape or surrounding vehicles at almost the same speed or on the road in the woods. On the structured road, lane markings as static semantic features may provide a stable landmark assist in robust localization. As most of the current lane detection work mainly on separated images ignoring the relationship between adjacent frames, we propose a pixel-level lane tracking method for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we introduce a deep network to detect and track lane features. The network has two parallel branches. One branch detects the lane position, while the other extracts the point description on a pixel level.

Formula One (F1) racing cars are often running at high-speed with the pitching angle changing frequently due to road conditions. These pitching angle changes result in changes to the car’s aerodynamic characteristics that will directly affect handling stability and other performance factors including safety. This paper takes a F1 racing car as the model; the influence of the change of pitching angle on aerodynamic drag force and lift force are investigated. CFD code-PowerFLOW based LBM is used to simulate the aerodynamic characteristics with different pitching angles. The distribution of aerodynamic coefficients, velocity and pressure in the flow field are obtained; and the differences between different pitching angles were analyzed. The results show that as the pitching angle increases, the drag force increases and the lift force decreases. The down-force of the car is mainly supplied by the front wing and the rear wing.

For the roll vibration problem of a Truck, a 4-DOF roll vibration model of its front suspension system was built. According to dynamics theory, the complex modal vibration modes of the model were all obtained. At the same time, the frequency response functions of frame roll angle acceleration, the relative dynamic load of wheel and the suspension dynamic deflection were respectively presented. Then their characteristics were respectively researched. In the process of characteristic analysis, a new system parameter was proposed, which is the space ratio of the space between suspensions of left and right sides and the wheel track of the front axle (space ratio in short). At last, the influence of system parameters on the vibration transmission property was also reserached, which included the natural frequency of the frame, the damping ratio, the stiffness ratio, the mass ratio, the rotational inertia ratio and the space ratio.

Numerical simulations on the fluid-structure interaction were conducted using commercial software STAR-CCM+ and ABAQUS. The aeroelastic responses of a deflector under several different working conditions were simulated utilizing finite volume and finite element methods to investigate the aeroelastic problem of automotive deflectors. Results showed that the structural response of a top deflector is minimal under the influence of aerodynamics given its large structural stiffness. The size of the top deflector was optimised by using thickness as a variable. The volume and quality of the top deflector were significantly reduced, and its lightweight performance was improved to satisfy the stiffness performance requirement. The vibration of a side deflector structure was mainly induced by the turbulence on the structure surface. The amplitude of vibration was small and the vibration gradually converged in a few seconds without obvious regularity.

Flying cars—as a new type of vehicle for urban air mobility (UAM)—have become an important development trend for the transborder integration of automotive and aeronautical technologies and industries. This article introduces the 100-year history of flying cars, examines the current research status for UAM air buses and air taxis, and discusses the future development trend of intelligent transportation and air-to-land amphibious vehicles. Unsettled Topics Concerning Flying Cars for Urban Air Mobility identifies the major bottlenecks and impediments confronting the development of flying cars, such as high power density electric propulsion, high lift-to-drag ratio and lightweight body structures, and low-altitude intelligent flight. Furthermore, it proposes three phased goals and visions for the development of flying cars in China, suggesting the development of a flying vehicle technology innovation system that integrates automotive and aeronautic industries.

This paper addresses the issues of long-term signal loss in localization and cumulative drift in SLAM-based online mapping and localization in autonomous valet parking scenarios. A GPS, INS, and SLAM fusion localization framework is proposed, enabling centimeter-level localization with wide scene adaptability at multiple scales. The framework leverages the coupling of LiDAR and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to create a point cloud map within the parking environment. The IMU pre-integration information is used to provide rough pose estimation for point cloud frames, and distortion correction, line and plane feature extraction are performed for pose estimation. The map is optimized and aligned with a global coordinate system during the mapping process, while a visual Bag-of-Words model is built to remove dynamic features.

Reliable and safe Redundant Steering System (RSS) equipped with Dual-Winding Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (DW-PMSM) is considered an ideal actuator for future autonomous vehicle chassis. The built-in DW-PMSM of the RSS is required to identify various winding’s faults such as disconnection, open circuit, and grounding. When achieving redundant control through winding switching, it is necessary to suppress speed fluctuations during the process of winding switching to ensure angle control precision. In this paper, a steering angle safety control for RSS considering motor winding’s faults is proposed. First, we analyze working principle of RSS. Corresponding steering system model and fault model of DW-PMSM have been established. Next, we design the fault diagnosis and fault tolerance strategy of RSS.