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Honda R&D Technical Review is a periodical containing research papers related to Honda R&D Center activities worldwide that cover automobile, motorcycle, power products, aircraft engine, and other fundamental technologies. Honda Motor offers a book for the April 2021 issue with 104 pages containing 12 papers focusing on the following latest topics: Technology for Prediction of Contactor Noise for Electric-powered Vehicle Batteries Reduction of Internal Resistance in High Capacity Lithium-ion Batteries with 3D Lattice-structured Electrode Predictive Technique for Seat Belt Submarining Injury by Triaxial Iliac Load Cell

"Spotlight on Design" features video interviews and case study segments, focusing on the latest technology breakthroughs. Viewers are virtually taken to labs and research centers to learn how design engineers are enhancing product performance/reliability, reducing cost, improving quality, safety or environmental impact, and achieving regulatory compliance. Fuel efficiency, or simply put, how to get more mileage out of the same amount of fuel has become one of the main goals to be achieved by new automotive technologies in the future, thanks in part to new government regulations. In the episode "Fuel Efficiency: Racing toward CAFE 2025" (21:24) AVL engineers show simulation and testing being used to design more fuel efficient vehicles, including the equipment that actually analyzes fuel economy.

"Spotlight on Design: Insight" features an in-depth look at the latest technology breakthroughs impacting mobility. Viewers are virtually taken to labs and research centers to learn how design engineers are enhancing product performance/reliability, reducing cost, improving quality, safety or environmental impact, and achieving regulatory compliance. As global concerns about the negative consequences of greenhouse gases on the environment increase, regulatory agencies around the world are taking serious steps to address the issue of tailpipe emissions In the episode "Fuel Efficiency: Fuel Economy Testing" (12:01), engineers at the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory demonstrate how different vehicles are tested for emissions, and AVL’s technical team shows how accurate tailpipe emissions can be measured and reported.

When vehicles share certain information wirelessly via Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), they enable a new layer of electronic vehicle safety that, when needed, can generate warnings to drivers and even initiate automatic preventive actions. Vehicle location and velocity provided by Global Navigation Systems (GNSS), including GPS, are key in allowing vehicle path estimation. GNSS is effective in accurately determining a vehicle's location coordinates in most driving environments, but its performance suffers from obstructions in dense urban environments. To combat this, augmentations to GNSS are being contemplated and tested. This testing has been typically done using a reference GNSS system complimented by expensive military-grade inertial sensors, which can still fail to provide adequate reference performance in certain environments.

Virtual testing is a method that simulates lab testing using multi-body dynamic analysis software. The main advantages of this approach include that the design can be evaluated before a prototype is available and virtual testing results can be easily validated by subsequent physical testing. The disadvantage is that accurate specimen models are sometimes hard to obtain since nonlinear components such as tires, bushings, dampers, and engine mounts are hard to model. Therefore, virtual testing accuracy varies significantly. The typical virtual rigs include tire and spindle coupled test rigs for full vehicle tests and multi axis shaker tables for component tests. Hybrid simulation combines physical and virtual components, inputs and constraints to create a composite simulation system. Hybrid simulation enables the hard to model components to be tested in the lab.

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.

These advanced checks have resulted in development of many new diagnostic monitors, of varying types, and a whole new internal software infrastructure to handle tracking, reporting, and self-verification of OBD related items. Due to this amplified complexity and the consequences surrounding a shortfall in meeting regulatory requirements, efficient and thorough validation of the OBD system in the powertrain control software is critical. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation provides the environment in which the needed efficiency and thoroughness for validating the OBD system can be achieved. A HIL simulation environment consisting of engine, aftertreatment, and basic vehicle models can be employed, providing the ability for software developers, calibration engineers, OBD experts, and test engineers to examine and validate both facets of OBD software: diagnostic monitors and diagnostic infrastructure (i.e., fault memory management).

The Focus Electric is Ford�s first full-featured 5 passenger battery electric vehicle. The engineering team set our sights on achieving best-in-class function and efficiency and was successful with an EPA certified 1XX MPGe and range XXX then the facing competition allowing for a slightly lower capacity battery pack and larger vehicle without customer trade-off. We briefly overview the engineering method and technologies employed to deliver the results as well as sharing some of the functional challenges unique to this type of vehicle. Presenter Charles Gray, Ford Motor Co.

Vehicle electrification is shaping the future of automotive mobility in terms of automotive power and propulsion. The market for New Energy Vehicles (HEV/PHEV/REEV/EV) as well as clean vehicle technologies is expected to grow steadily driven by government regulations mandating increased fuel economy and lower emissions. The fastest growth in this market will be in Asia Pacific, most notably China. The Chinese government has made its intentions clear on how important it considers the development and consumer purchase of hybrid and electric vehicles. The mandate is that by year 2012, vehicle manufacturers produce at least 500,000 units (or 5%) per year of their total output as hybrid and/or electric. All Chinese vehicle manufacturers must have at least one HEV or EV model in the market by the same year. Thus far China has invested over US$3.5 billion to stimulate the production of NEVs and the necessary infrastructure to support them.

The rapid pace of recent progress in vehicle electrification technologies points to a bright future for electric-drive vehicles, but uncertainty regarding future technical trajectories and uncertainty in consumer response make possible a multitude of electric-drive vehicle futures. This presentation will examine a range of these possible electric-drive futures as a function of different technology and pricing scenarios. An exploration of initial conditions, market uptake, and resulting social benefits will show how HEV and PEV technology enable the attainment of stringent vehicle efficiency goals and unlock potential for lower-carbon futures. Presenter Jacob Ward, Department Of Energy

Trans Tech recently debuted the all-electric eTrans school bus providing a total zero emission school bus. The presentation will demonstrate Smith Electric Vehicles and their history with electric vehicles. The presentation will help ensure that everybody has an idea of what the electric school bus will do and to dispel any rumors about the vehicle. Presenter Brian S. Barrington, Trans Tech. Bus

We report here results from first year of the BMW MINI E deployment. BMW deployed 450 MINI E?s to North America. Nearly 50% were leased by households in Los Angeles and the New York area. PH&EV Center researchers surveyed MINI E drivers throughout their year with the vehicles, focusing on the experiences of 50 households who volunteered for more detailed interviews. We report here their experiences with driving electric vehicles, adaptions to daily range limitations, and using electricity as a fuel. Presenter Thomas Turrentine, Univ. of California-Davis

ECOtality North America, in partnership with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Nissan North America, General Motors, and over 40 government, electric utility, and private organizations, has launched a large-scale demonstration of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. This demonstration, called The EV Project, will deploy more than 15,000 level 2 and DC fast chargers in private residence, commercial, and public locations in seven market areas in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Washington state, and Washington, D.C. The EV Project will also include a total of 5,700 Nissan Leaf battery electric vehicles and 2,600 Chevrolet Volt extended range electric vehicles, operated by consumers and fleets in each of the market areas. This demonstration, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy�s (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Program, represents the largest ever deployment of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.

The presentation offers a brief history of the electric vehicle and parallels the realities of those early vehicles with the challenges and solutions of the electrified vehicles coming to market today. A technology evolution for every major component of these vehicles has now made this mode of transportation viable. The Focus Electric is Ford's first electric passenger car utilizing the advanced technology developments to meet the needs of electric car buyers in this emerging market. Presenter Charles Gray, Ford Motor Co.

Optical fiber has begun replacing copper in avionic networks. So far, however, it has been mainly restricted to non-critical applications (video transmission to the flight deck, IFE?). In order to take advantage of the high-bandwidth, low weight, no EMI properties of optical fibers in all data transmission networks, it will be necessary to improve the testing. One part of the puzzle, which is still missing, is the self-test button: the possibility to check the network and detect potential failures before they occur. The typical testing tool of a technician involved in optical fiber cables is the ?light source ? optical power meter? pair. With this tool, one can measure the insertion loss of the fiber link. A second important parameter, the return loss at each optical connector, is not analysed. In addition, this is only a global measurement, which does not allow the detection of possible weak points.

Edgewater Computer Systems Inc. product RTEdge Platform 1.2 is a software toolset supporting proof based engineering, implementation and deployment of software components, built using the RTEdge AADL Microkernel modeling subset. This is a small subset of the AADL component model and execution semantics, covering threads and thread-groups communicating solely through asynchronous event ports and through explicitly shared data ports. Threads behavior is expressed as state machines and dispatch run time semantics is encoded in a Run-time Executive, enforcing pre-emptive priority dispatch based on statically assigned event priorities, with ceiling priority protocol access to shared data. This simple AADL microkernel semantic core can support all dispatch policies, communication and synchronization mechanisms of a fully fledged AADL run time environment, permitting the systematic use of the RTEdge static analysis tools for AADL compliant software components.

The use of Engine Health Management (EHM) systems has been growing steadily in both the civilian and the military aerospace sectors. Barring a few notable exceptions (such as certain temperature and thrust margin monitoring) regulatory authorities around the world have not required these systems to be certified in any way. This is changing rapidly. New airframes and engines are increasingly being designed with the assumption that EHM will be an integral part of the way customers will operate these assets. This leads to a need for better guidelines on how such systems should be certified. The SAE E-32 committee on Propulsion System Health Monitoring is leading an industry-wide effort to develop a set of guidelines for certifying EHM systems.

The System Architecture Virtual Integration (SAVI) program is a collaboration of industry, government, and academic organizations within the Aerospace Vehicle System Institute (AVSI) with the goal of structuring a new integration process that relies on a single-truth architectural framework. The SAVI approach of Integrate, then Build provides a modern distributed development environment which arrests the propagation of requirements errors through the development life cycle. It does so by capturing design assumptions and shared properties of the system design in an authoritative, annotated architectural model. This reference model provides a common, analyzable framework for confirming that system requirements remain complete, consistent, and correct at all levels of system decomposition. Core concepts of SAVI include extensive use of model-based system engineering tools and use of a single-truth reference architectural model.

By introducing the concept of a separation between graphics and logic, interpreted run time architecture, and defined communication protocol, the ARINC 661 standard has addressed many of the concerns that aircraft manufacturers face when creating cockpit avionics displays. However, before kicking off a project based on the standard, it is important to understand all aspects of the standard, as well as the benefits and occasional drawbacks of developing with ARINC 661 in mind. This white paper will first provide an overview of ARINC 661 to clarify its concepts and how these relate to the development process. The paper will also describe the benefits of using a distributed development approach, and will outline practical, real world considerations for implementing an ARINC 661-based solution. Finally, readers will learn how commercial tools can be used to simplify the creation of displays following the standard to speed development and reduce costs.