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Electrified powertrains will play a growing role in meeting global fuel consumption and CO2 requirements. In support of this, FCA US has developed its first dedicated hybrid transmission (the eFlite® transmission), used in the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. The Chrysler Pacifica is the industry’s first electrified minivan. [2] The new eFlite hybrid transmission architecture optimizes performance, fuel economy, mass, packaging and NVH. The transmission is an electrically variable FWD transaxle with an input split configuration and incorporates two electric motors, both capable of driving in EV mode. The lubrication and cooling system makes use of two pumps, one electrically operated and one mechanically driven. The Chrysler Pacifica has a 16kWh lithium ion battery and a 3.6-liter Pentastar® engine which offers total system power of 260 hp with 84 MPGe, 33 miles of all electric range and 566 miles total driving range. [2] This paper’s focus is on the eFlite transmission.

Driveline launch shudder is a second-order vibration phenomenon excited by the driveline system in vehicles. It is experienced as low-frequency tactile vibrations at the vehicle seat track and is further deteriorated by a high torque demand from the engine. These vibrations are unwanted and affect the vehicle ride quality. A virtual method has been developed in ADAMS/Car to simulate the driveline launch shudder event for solid axle suspension architecture vehicles. Detailed modeling of the full vehicle system with appropriate boundary conditions has been presented. The simulated driveline launch shudder event has been quantified in the form of axle windup and accelerations at the driveline pinion, center bearing and seat track locations. A physical test correlation case study has been performed to validate the developed virtual method. This virtual method is also successfully applied to provide a driveline launch shudder mitigation enabler to improve vehicle ride performance.

Electronic Stop-Start (ESS) system automatically stops and restarts the engine to save energy, improve fuel economy and reduce emissions when the vehicle is stationary during traffic lights, traffic jams etc. The stop and start events cause unwanted vibrations at the seat track which induce discomfort to the driver and passengers in the vehicle. These events are very short duration events, usually taking less than a second. Time domain analysis can help in simulating this event but it is difficult to see modal interactions and root cause issues. Modal transient analysis also poses a limitation on defining frequency dependent stiffness and damping for multiple mounts. This leads to inaccuracy in capturing mount behavior at different frequencies. Most efficient way to simulate this event would be by frequency response analysis using modal superposition method.

For the designing of world class vehicles, ride comfort is one of the criteria that vehicle manufacturers are constantly trying to improve. The automotive seating system is an important sub-system in a vehicle that contributes to the ride comfort of the vehicle occupants. Seat vibrations are perceived by the occupants and make them feel uncomfortable during driving conditions. These vibrations are majorly transferred from engine and road excitation loads. For road excitation loads, the road testing may not be accurately repeatable, and measurements based on four post shakers are used to assess the discomfort. The major challenges for the vehicle manufactures is the availability of physical prototypes at an early stage of vehicle development and any changes in the design due to test validation leads to huge cost and time.

Water fording events are one of the most challenging situations that vehicles undergo during their lifetime. During these events the underbody components (e.g. Front fascia, Bellypan, wheel liner etc.) are subject to very high loads. Typically, vehicle water fording tests are performed for various depths of water at prescribed vehicle speeds. Water fording tests are usually carried out during the proto phase of the vehicle development program to ensure acceptable performance. If issues are discovered, making changes to the fascia or body panels are typically very expensive. To avoid late changes, a fully virtual methodology was developed to facilitate vehicle water fording performance. The simulation is targeted to evaluate multiple aspects such as air induction system and estimation of hydrodynamic loads on body panel components.

A vehicle driving down the road naturally pitches, rolls and heaves due to road inputs (for example, bumps, potholes, driving dynamics, etc.) and also due to the influence of aerodynamic forces. The vehicle attitude changes directly as a result of aerodynamic forces that can be seen during wind tunnel testing of production level vehicles, with some measurements possible in order to evaluate the aerodynamics effects. This naturally occurring phenomenon is not always represented in aerodynamics simulations, either for reduced scale models or computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations or even rigid body full scale testing. It can be shown through visual techniques how much deflection is typically occurring, including both vehicle attitude changes as well as vehicle body distortions. From the analysis, an adjustment to the CFD models can be made to compensate for the aerodynamics effects.

In the last few years, the effect of diabatic test conditions on compressor performance maps has been widely investigated, leading some Authors to propose different correction models. The accuracy of turbocharger performance map constitute the basis for the tuning and validation of a numerical method, usually adopted for the prediction of engine-turbocharger matching. Actually, it is common practice in automotive applications to use simulation codes, which can either require measured compression ratio and efficiency maps as input values or calculate them “on the fly” throughout specific sub-models integrated in the numerical procedures. Therefore, the ability to correct the measured performance maps taking into account internal heat transfer would allow the implementation of commercial simulation codes used for engine-turbocharger matching calculations.

Detailed and fast combustion models are necessary to support design of Diesel engines with low emission and fuel consumption. Over the years, the importance of turbulence chemistry interaction to correctly describe the diffusion flame structure was demonstrated by a detailed assessment with optical data from constant-volume vessel experiments. The main objective of this work is to carry out an extensive validation of two different combustion models which are suitable for the simulation of Diesel engine combustion. The first one is the Representative Interactive Flamelet model (RIF) employing direct chemistry integration. A single flamelet formulation is generally used to reduce the computational time but this aspect limits the capability to reproduce the flame stabilization process. To overcome such limitation, a second model called tabulated flamelet progress variable (TFPV) is tested in this work.

As the move to decrease physical prototyping increases the need to virtually prototype vehicles become more critical. Assessing NVH vehicle targets and making critical component level decisions is becoming a larger part of the NVH engineer’s job. To make decisions earlier in the process when prototypes are not available companies need to leverage more both their historical and simulation results. Today this is possible by utilizing a hybrid modelling approach in an NVH Simulator using measured on road, CAE, and test bench data. By starting with measured on road data from a previous generation or comparable vehicle, engineers can build virtual prototypes by using a hybrid modeling approach incorporating CAE and/or test bench data to create the desired NVH characteristics. This enables the creation of a virtual drivable model to assess subjectively the vehicles acoustic targets virtually before a prototype vehicle is available.

Automotive thermal systems are becoming complicated each year. The powertrain efficiency improvement initiatives are driving transmission and engine oil heaters into coolant network design alternatives. The initiatives of electrified and autonomous vehicles are making coolant networks even more complex. The coolant networks these days have many heat exchangers, electric water pumps and valves, apart from typical radiators, thermostat and heater core. Some of these heat exchangers, including cabin heaters deal with very small amount of coolant flow rates at different ambient conditions. This paper describes how viscosity can be a major reason for simulation inaccuracy, and how to deal with it for each component in the coolant network. Both experimental and computational aspects have been considered in this paper with wide range of ambient temperatures.

Cylinder deactivation has been in use for several years resulting in a sizable fuel economy advantage for V8-powered vehicles. The size of the fuel-economy benefit, compared to the full potential possible, is often limited due to the amount of usable torque available in four-cylinder-mode being capped by Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) sensitivities of various rear-wheel-drive vehicle architectures. This paper describes the application and optimization of active vibration absorbers as a system to attenuate vibration through several paths from the powertrain-driveline into the car body. The use of this strategy for attenuating vibration at strategic points is shown to diminish the need for reducing the powertrain source amplitude. This paper describes the process by which the strategic application of these devices is developed in order to achieve the increased usage of the most fuel efficient reduced-cylinder-count engine-operating-points.

Cost benefit and teraflop restrictions imposed by racing sanctioning bodies make steady-state RANS CFD simulation a widely accepted first approximation tool for aerodynamics evaluations in motorsports, in spite of its limitations. Research involving generic and simplified vehicle bodies has shown that the veracity of aerodynamic CFD predictions strongly depends on the turbulence model being used. Also, the ability of a turbulence model to accurately predict aerodynamic characteristics can be vehicle shape dependent as well. Modifications to the turbulence model coefficients in some of the models have the potential to improve the predictive capability for a particular vehicle shape. This paper presents a systematic study of turbulence modeling effects on the prediction of aerodynamic characteristics of a NASCAR Gen-6 Cup racecar. Steady-state RANS simulations are completed using a commercial CFD package, STAR-CCM+, from CD-Adapco.

In response to demands for higher fuel economy and stringent emission regulations, OEMs always strive hard to improve component/system efficiency and minimize losses. In the driveline system, improving the efficiency of an automotive rear-axle is critical because it is one of the major power-loss contributor. Optimum oil-fill inside an axle is one of the feasible solutions to minimize spin losses, while ensuring lubrication performance and heat-dissipation requirements. Thus, prior to conducting vehicle development tests, several dyno-level tests are conducted to study the thermal behavior of axle-oil (optimum level) under severe operating conditions. These test conditions represent the axle operation in hot weather conditions, steep grade, maximum tow capacity, etc. It is important to ensure that oil does not exceed its thermal limits (disintegration of oil leading to degradation).

In this paper, transient component temperatures for the vehicle under-hood and underbody are estimated. The main focus is on the component temperatures as a result of radiation from exhaust, convection by underbody or under-hood air and heat conduction through the components. The exhaust surface temperature is simulated as function of time and for various vehicle duty cycles such as city traffic, road load and grade driving conditions. At each time step the radiation flux to the surrounding component is estimated, heat addition or removal by convection is evaluated based on air flow, air temperature and component surface area. Simulation results for under-hood and underbody components are compared against vehicle test data. The comparison shows very good agreement between simulated and measured component temperatures under both steady state and transient conditions.

Detailed chemistry and turbulence-chemistry interaction need to be properly taken into account for a realistic combustion simulation of IC engines where advanced combustion modes, multiple injections and stratified combustion involve a wide range of combustion regimes and require a proper description of several phenomena such as auto-ignition, flame stabilization, diffusive combustion and lean premixed flame propagation. To this end, different approaches are applied and the most used ones rely on the well-stirred reactor or flamelet assumption. However, well-mixed models do not describe correctly flame structure, while unsteady flamelet models cannot easily predict premixed flame propagation and triple flames. A possible alternative for them is represented by transported probability density functions (PDF) methods, which have been applied widely and effectively for modeling turbulent reacting flows under a wide range of combustion regimes.

The implementation and the combination of advanced boundary conditions and subgrid scale models for Large Eddy Simulation (LES) in the multi-dimensional open-source CFD code OpenFOAM® are presented. The goal is to perform reliable cold flow LES simulations in complex geometries, such as in the cylinders of internal combustion engines. The implementation of a boundary condition for synthetic turbulence generation upstream of the valve port and of the compressible formulation of the Wall-Adapting Local Eddy-viscosity sgs model (WALE) is described. The WALE model is based on the square of the velocity gradient tensor and it accounts for the effects of both the strain and the rotation rate of the smallest resolved turbulent fluctuations and it recovers the proper y₃ near-wall scaling for the eddy viscosity without requiring dynamic procedure; hence, it is supposed to be a very reliable model for ICE simulation.

In future decarbonized scenarios, hydrogen is widely considered as one of the best alternative fuels for internal combustion engines, allowing to achieve zero CO2 emissions at the tailpipe. However, NOx emissions represent the predominant pollutants and their production has to be controlled. In this work different strategies for the control and abatement of pollutant emissions on a H2-fueled high-performance V8 twin turbo 3.9L IC engine are tested. The characterization of pollutant production on a single-cylinder configuration is carried out by means of the 1D code Gasdyn, considering lean and homogeneous conditions. The NOx are extremely low in lean conditions with respect to the emissions legislation limits, while the maximum mass flow rate remains below the turbocharger technical constraint limit at λ=1 only.

This paper introduces a novel approach to modeling Torque Converter (TC) in conventional and hybrid vehicles, aiming to enhance torque delivery accuracy and efficiency. Traditionally, the TC is modelled by estimating impeller and turbine torque using the classical Kotwicki’s set of equations for torque multiplication and coupling regions or a generic lookup table based on dynamometer (dyno) data in an electronic control unit (ECU) which can be calibration intensive, and it is susceptible to inaccurate estimations of impeller and turbine torque due to engine torque accuracy, transmission oil temperature, hardware variation, etc. In our proposed method, we leverage an understanding of the TC inertia – torque dynamics and the knowledge of the polynomial relationship between slip speed and fluid path torque. We establish a mathematical model to represent the polynomial relationship between turbine torque and slip speed.

The aim of the paper is to provide simple and accurate analytical formulae describing the straight motion of a road vehicle. Such formulae can be used to compute either the steering torque or the additional rolling resistance induced by vehicle side-slip angle. The paper introduces a revised formulation of the Handling Diagram Theory to take into account tire ply-steer, conicity and road banking. Pacejka’s Handling Diagram Theory is based on a relatively simple fully non-linear single track model. We will refer to the linear part of the Handling Diagram, since straight motion will be considered only. Both the elastokinematics of suspension system and tire characteristics are taken into account. The validation of the analytical expressions has been performed both theoretically and after a subjective-objective test campaign. By means of the new and unreferenced analytical formulae, practical hints are given to set to zero the steering torque during straight running.

In an Internal Combustion (IC) Engine, the exhaust manifold has the primary function of channeling products of combustion from cylinder head runners to the emissions system through a collector. Exhaust manifolds must endure severe thermal loads and high strain caused by channeling extremely hot gases and fastener loads, respectively. The combination of these two loads can lead to Thermomechanical Fatigue (TMF) failures after repeated operational cycles if they are not assessed and addressed adequately during the design process. Therefore, it is vital to have a methodology in place to evaluate the life of an engine component (such as the exhaust manifold) using a TMF damage prediction model. To accomplish this, spatial temperature prediction and maximum value attained, as well as temporal distribution, are the most important input conditions.