Search Results

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.

Can you become a visionary or are you born one? How does a visionary capture an opportunity and makes it a successful business? Are engineers more qualified to solve technical problems or run companies? SAE's "The Visionary's Take" addresses these and many other questions, by talking directly with those who have dared to tackle difficult engineering problems, and create real-life products out of their experience. In these short episodes, Sanjiv Singh and Lyle Chamberlain, respectively CEO and Chief Engineer from Near Earth Autonomy, talk about their experience in creating a brand-new company in the UAV world. Founded in 2011, Near Earth Autonomy brought together a group of engineers and roboticists, looking for unconventional solutions to very hard logistics problems, presenting danger to human life. The answers were developed by pushing technology to a higher level, testing quickly and often, and keeping an open mind to alternative ways of framing engineering challenges.

Can you become a visionary or are you born one? How does a visionary capture an opportunity and makes it a successful business? Are engineers more qualified to solve technical problems or run companies? SAE's "The Visionary's Take" addresses these and many other questions, by talking directly with those who have dared to tackle difficult engineering problems, and create real-life products out of their experience. In these short episodes, Sanjiv Singh and Lyle Chamberlain, respectively CEO and Chief Engineer from Near Earth Autonomy, talk about their experience in creating a brand-new company in the UAV world. Founded in 2011, Near Earth Autonomy brought together a group of engineers and roboticists, looking for unconventional solutions to very hard logistics problems, presenting danger to human life. The answers were developed by pushing technology to a higher level, testing quickly and often, and keeping an open mind to alternative ways of framing engineering challenges.

Abstract Dynamic stresses exist in parts of a catalyst muffler caused by the vibration of a moving vehicle, and it is important to clarify and predict the vibration response properties for preventing fatigue failures. Assuming a vibration isolating installation in the vehicle frame, the vibration transmissibility and local dynamic stress of the catalyst muffler were examined through a vibration machine. Based on the measured data and by systematically taking vibration theories into consideration, a new prediction method of the vibration modes and parameters was proposed that takes account of vibration isolating and damping. A lumped vibration model with the six-element and one mass point was set up, and the vibration response parameters were analyzed accurately from equations of motion. In the vibration test, resonance peaks from the hanging bracket, rubber bush, and muffler parts were confirmed in three excitation drives, and local stress peaks were coordinate with them as well.

Abstract Reliability analysis of a large-scale system under random dynamic loads can be a very time-consuming task since it requires repeated studies of the system. In many engineering problems, for example, wave loads on an offshore platform, the excitation loads are defined using a power spectral density (PSD) function. For a given PSD function, one needs to generate many time histories to make sure the excitation load is modeled accurately. Global and local approximation methods are available to predict the system response efficiently. Each way has their advantages and shortcomings. The combined approximations (CA) method is an efficient method, which combines the advantages of local and global approximations. This work demonstrates two methodologies that utilize CA to reduce the cost of crude or separable Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) of linear dynamic systems when the excitation loads are defined using PSD functions.

With the introduction of advanced digital road maps, which include information on the slope and curve radius of the highways, predictive control for standard and hybrid commercial vehicles, based on these maps, is about to be released by the vehicle manufacturers. For example, intelligent predictive cruise control has been announced for introduction in 2012 by Scania and Daimler. In addition, hybrid commercial city buses like MAN's Lion's City Hybrid have already been implemented. But the question remains about the type of vehicle suitable for the implementation of predictive intelligent concepts, due to the high investment cost compared to the sometimes relatively low operating cost savings.

Road vibrations cause fatigue failures in vehicle components and systems. Therefore, reliable and accurate damage and life assessment is crucial to the durability and reliability performances of vehicles, especially at early design stages. However, durability and reliability assessment is difficult not only because of the unknown underlying damage mechanisms, such as crack initiation and crack growth, but also due to the large uncertainties introduced by many factors during operation. How to effectively and accurately assess the damage status and quantitatively measure the uncertainties in a damage evolution process is an important but still unsolved task in engineering probabilistic analysis. In this paper, a new procedure is developed to assess the durability and reliability performance, and characterize the uncertainties of damage evolution of components under constant amplitude loadings.

This paper describes the development and testing of a Dynamic Vibration Absorber to reduce frame beaming vibration in a highway tractor. Frame beaming occurs when the first vertical bending mode of the frame is excited by road or wheel-end inputs. It is primarily a problem for driver comfort. Up until now, few options were available to resolve this problem. The paper will review the phenomenon, design factors affecting a vehicle's sensitivity to frame beaming, and the principles of Dynamic Vibration Absorbers (AKA Tuned Mass Dampers). Finally, the paper will describe simulation and testing that led to the development of an effective vibration absorber as a field fix.

Catalysts and filters continue to be applied widely to meet particulate matter regulations across new and retrofit diesel engines. Soot management of the filter continues to be enhanced, including regeneration methodologies. Concerns regarding in-cylinder post-injection of fuel for active regeneration increases interests in directly injecting this fuel into the exhaust. Performance of secondary fuel injection layouts is discussed, and sensitivities on thermal uniformity are measured and analyzed, providing insight to packaging challenges and methods to characterize and improve application designs. Influences of end cone geometries, mixers, and injector mounting positions are quantified via thermal distribution at each substrate's outlet. A flow laboratory is applied for steady state characterization, repeated on an engine dynamometer, which also provides transient results across the NRTC.

This manuscript provides a review of different types and categorization of the chassis dynamometer systems. The review classifies the chassis dynamometers based on the configuration, type of rollers and the application type. Additionally the manuscript discusses several application examples of the chassis dynamometer including: performance and endurance mileage accumulation tests, fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions, noise, vibration and harshness testing (NVH). Different types of the vehicle attachment system in the dynamometer cell and its influences on the driving force characteristics and the vehicle acoustic signature is also discussed. The text also highlights the impact of the use of the chassis dynamometer as a development platform and its impact on the development process. Examples of using chassis dynamometer as a development platform using Vehicle Hardware In-the-Loop (VHiL) approach including drivability assessment and transmission calibrations are presented.

Vibrations of plates are widely seen in various applications of automobile, aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering. Vibration analysis of plates in medium and high-frequency regions plays an important role in optimal design and safe operation of machines and structures in these applications. Medium and high-frequency vibration analysis of plates is usually performed by using numerical methods. Proposed in this paper is a new analytical solution method for mid- and high-frequency analysis of thin rectangular plates modeled by the Kirchhoff-Love plate theory. In the development, analytical solutions for a class of thin plates are obtained based on a hybrid formulation that combines the Distributed Transfer Function Method (DTFM) and modal expansion. The proposed method, which is an extension of the DTFM for one-dimensional continua, is called the hybrid Distributed Transfer Function Method (hybrid DTFM).

Noise & Vibration refinement of automotive vehicles is becoming important parameter due to its influence on environmental aspect and comfort perceived by occupants. NVH parameters are driving factors in current vehicle design strategy. Drivers comfort is extremely important, and driver’s expectations from commercial and heavy-duty trucks are as good as refined passenger cars. Other trends in commercial vehicle segment such as engine downsizing, weight, cost reduction and meeting stringent emission norms have influenced vehicle design dynamics. These parameters are critical and often contribute to vehicle NVH issues. Considering these new trends in commercial vehicle segment, it becomes challenging for an NVH engineer to provide optimized solutions. NVH issues could be related to the various subsystems such as driveline, axle, transmission steering wheel etc. in the vehicle and its resonant frequencies.

India contributed to 11% of the global road accidents and was ranked 1st among road deaths according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) report 2018. Indian National Highways (NH) is a meagre 5% of the country’s road network but accounts for 55% of the road accidents and 61% of the road deaths. Majority of the freight traffic is ferried by Commercial Vehicles (CV) or trucks along these highways and this in turn increases the probability of them being involved in a road accident. The country’s economy is forecasted to thrive in the coming years and hence the requirement of CVs is aligned to international categorisation in the supply chain and shall play a pivotal role. In the year 2019, 13,532 road deaths were associated with CV occupants. The trucking industry is an unorganized sector wherein the illegal overloading of vehicles and over-the-limit driving hours pose a serious threat to road users.

In today’s automobile industry refined NVH performance is a key feature and of high importance governing occupant comfort and overall quality impression of vehicle. In this paper interior noise and vibration measurement is done on one of the light truck and few dominant low frequency noise booms were observed in operation range. Modal analysis was done for the cabin at virtual as well as experimental level and few modes were found close to these noise booms. Vibrations were measured across the cabin mounts and it was found that the isolation of front mounts is not effective at lower frequencies. Taking this as an input, the mount design was modified to shift the natural frequency and hence improve the isolation behavior at the lowest dominant frequency. This was followed by static and dynamic measurement of the mounts at test rig level to characterize the dynamic performance and stiffness conclusion.

Despite numerous research efforts, there is no reliable and widely accepted tool for the prediction of erosion prone material surfaces due to collapse of cavitation bubbles. In the present paper an Erosion Aggressiveness Index (EAI) is proposed, based on the pressure loads which develop on the material surface and the material yield stress. EAI depends on parameters of the liquid quality and includes the fourth power of the maximum bubble radius and the bubble size number density distribution. Both the newly proposed EAI and the Cavitation Aggressiveness Index (CAI), which has been previously proposed by the authors based on the total derivative of pressure at locations of bubble collapse (DP/Dt>0, Dα/Dt<0), are computed for a cavitating flow orifice, for which experimental and numerical results on material erosion have been published. The predicted surface area prone to cavitation damage, as shown by the CAI and EAI indexes, is correlated with the experiments.

This paper starts with an analysis of design configurations of the drivelines with different power-dividing units (PDUs) of main dump truck manufacturing companies. As it follows from the analysis, improvements of articulated truck energy efficiency and reduction of fuel consumption by optimizing the power distribution to the drive wheels are still open issues. The problem is that a variety of operating and terrain conditions of dump trucks requires different wheel power distributions that cannot be provided by one set of PDUs employed in a truck. The central PDU in the transfer case was identified as the most important PDU among the five PDUs, which plays a crucial role in the power distribution between the front axle and the rear tandem of a 6×6 articulated dump truck. The paper formulates a constraint optimization problem to minimize the tire slippage power losses by optimizing the power distribution between the drive wheels.

For decades, the medium- and heavy-duty (“MD/HD”) commercial vehicle industry has focused on improving freight efficiency in order to lower customers' total operating costs. To optimize fuel efficiency, most manufacturers no longer focus on discreet components but instead look at the complete vehicle and operations. The path to future efficiency gains is not sufficiently clear when looking towards 2030; what is clear is that one solution will not work for all manufacturers or vehicle applications. Therefore, fuel efficiency regulations must be sufficiently adaptive to allow a variety of technical approaches to ensure the needs of the commercial truck market are met. This paper explores further the ideas presented in other papers that focus on regulation of engine-only emissions as an approach for HD vehicles.

This study presents a probabilistic life (failure) and damage assessment approach for components under general fatigue loadings, including constant amplitude loading, step-stress loading, and variable amplitude loading. The approach consists of two parts: (1) an empirical probabilistic distribution obtained by fitting the fatigue failure data at various stress range levels, and (2) an inverse technique, which transforms the probabilistic life distribution to the probabilistic damage distribution at any applied cycle. With this approach, closed-form solutions of damage as function of the applied cycle can be obtained for constant amplitude loading. Under step-stress and variable amplitude loadings, the damage distribution at any cycle can be calculated based on the accumulative damage model in a cycle-by-cycle manner. For Gaussian-type random loading, a cycle-by-cycle equivalent, but a much simpler closed-form solution can be derived.

AUTOSAR is finding its way into the automotive industry. European automotive manufacturing companies were the early adopters defining and promoting AUTOSAR standard. One of the main AUTOSAR goals is to improve containment of product and process complexity and risk. Increased scalability and flexibility to integrate and transfer functions is another important goal of AUTOSAR. Working with different suppliers and vendors and respect their confidentiality makes the process of application software development even more complex. Presented in this paper is a creative way of utilizing AUTOSAR to overcome the integration challenges in a multi-party object code based software integration. The run time environment (RTE) files for the application software are generated through a set of scripts to automate the process for consecutive releases. The low level device drivers are configured by one supplier and are being used by another supplier through a set of AUTOSAR client-server operation calls.

Heavy-duty diesel engines are used in different application areas, like long-haul, city distribution, dump truck and building and construction industry. For these wide variety of areas, the engine performance needs to comply with the real-world legislation limits and should simultaneously have a low fuel consumption and good drivability. Meeting these requirements takes substantial development and calibration effort, where an optimal fuel consumption for each application is not always met in practice. TNO's Integrated Emission Management (IEM) strategy, is able to deal with these variations in operating conditions, while meeting legislation limits and obtaining on-line cost optimization. Based on the actual state of the engine and aftertreatment, optimal air-path setpoints are computed, which balances EGR and SCR usage.