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The increased use of zinc coatings on steels has led to a decrease in their weldability. Weld current and time need to be increased in order to achieve sound welds on these materials compared to uncoated steels, and electrode tip life suffers greatly due to rapid alloying and degradation. In this work, typical uncoated Class II electrodes were tested along with a TiC metal matrix composite (MMC) coated electrode. Tests were conducted to study the weldability and process of nugget formation for both electrodes on HDG (hot dipped galvanized) HSLA (high strength low alloys) steels. Current and time ranges were constructed for both types of electrodes by varying either the weld current or weld time while holding all other parameters constant. Analysis of weld microstructures was conducted on cross-sectioned welds using SEM (scanning electron microscopy). Using the coated electrodes reduced weld current and times needed to form MWS (minimum weld size) on the coated steels.

The present work investigates weld failure modes during formability tests of multi-gauge aluminum Tailor Welded Blanks (TWBs). The limiting dome height test is used to evaluate formability of TWBs. Three gauge combinations utilizing aluminum alloy 5754 sheets are considered (2 to 1 mm, 1.6 to 1 mm and 2 to 1.6 mm). Three weld orientations have been considered: transverse, longitudinal and 45°. Interaction of several factors determines the type of failure that occurs in a TWB specimen. These factors are weld orientation, morphology and distribution of weld defects, and the magnitude of constraint imposed by the thicker sheet to the thin sheet. The last factor depends on the difference in thickness of the sheet pair and is usually expressed in terms of gauge ratio. In general TWBs show two different types of fracture: weld failure and failure of the thin aluminum sheet. Only the former will be discussed in this paper.

Dynamic modelling of the contact between the tires of automobiles and the road surface is crucial for accurate and effective vehicle dynamic simulation and the development of various driving controllers. Furthermore, an accurate prediction of the rolling resistance is needed for powertrain controllers and controllers designed to reduce fuel consumption and engine emissions. Existing models of tires include physics-based analytical models, finite element based models, black box models, and data driven empirical models. The main issue with these approaches is that none of these models offer the balance between accuracy of simulation and computational cost that is required for the model-based development cycle. To address this issue, we present a volumetric approach to model the forces/moments between the tire and the road for vehicle dynamic simulations.

Accurately predicting the future trajectories of surrounding traffic agents is important for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. To address the scenario of frequent interactions among traffic agents in the highway merging area, this paper proposes a trajectory prediction method based on interactive graph attention mechanism. Our approach integrates an interactive graph model to capture the complex interactions among traffic agents as well as the interactions between these agents and the contextual map of the highway merging area. By leveraging this interactive graph model, we establish an agent-agent interactive graph and an agent-map interactive graph. Moreover, we employ Graph Attention Network (GAT) to extract spatial interactions among trajectories, enhancing our predictions. To capture temporal dependencies within trajectories, we employ a Transformer-based multi-head self-attention mechanism.

Diesel fuel is a blend of various middle distillate components separated at the refinery. The composition and characteristics of the diesel fuel blend changes daily if not hourly because of normal process variation, changing refinery processing conditions, changing crude oil diet or changing diesel fuel and kerosene market conditions. Regardless of the situation going on at the refinery or the market, the resultant diesel fuel must consistently meet established cloud point specifications. To consistently meet the cloud point specifications, refiners are forced to blend their diesel fuels in such a way that the resultant blend is always on the low side of the cloud point specification even when the refining process adversely changes the fuel characteristics. This practice has the effect of producing several degrees of cloud point “giveaway” when the refinery is not experiencing adverse swings in product quality.

The Engine Oil Industry Base Oil Interchange (BOI) and Viscosity Grade Read Across (VGRA) guidelines developed by the American Petroleum Institute (API) provide a means to significantly reduce the time to market for current technology oils. The guidelines also allow conversion of a fraction of the millions of dollars spent each year on engine testing in pursuit of API engine oil licensing into research testing and the development of fundamental knowledge. In the past, guidelines have been developed based upon a general assessment of minimal engine test data. Recently, however, regression models have been used to assess Base Oil and Viscosity Grade effects. The use of statistical regression models and Virtual Tests in determining effects to establish BOI and VGRA has several advantages. These advantages, demonstrated through an example and a case study, include volume of data and breadth of data.

One of the key functions of lubricating oil additives in diesel engines is to control oil thickening caused by soot accumulation. Over the last several years, it has become apparent that the composition of the base oil used within the lubricant plays an extremely important role in the oil thickening phenomenon. In particular, oil thickening observed in the Mack T-8 test is significantly affected by the aromatic content of the base oil. We have found that the Mack T-8 thickening phenomenon is associated with high electrical activity, i.e., engine drain oils which exhibit high levels of viscosity increase show significantly higher conductivities. These findings suggest that electrical interactions are involved in soot-induced oil thickening.

The present work is aimed at investigating the tribological factors influencing the LDH test. The material used was AKDQ cold-rolled bare steel, 0.82mm thick. The investigated factors included: test speed (0.833, 4.167, 6.667, and 8.333 mm/s), lubricant viscosity (4.5, 7.0, and 12.5 mm2/s), punch roughness (0.033 and 0.144 μm Ra), and test temperature (25 and 50 °C). Test speed and lubricant viscosity form a variation of the numerator of the Stribeck curve's x-axis (ηV). With ηV increasing from 4 to 120 mm3/s2 friction decreased, resulting in a 0.5 mm higher LDH. Increasing the punch roughness decreased friction producing an increase of 0.25 mm in the LDH. There appears to be an optimum roughness -- at which the roughness features act as lubricant reservoirs but the asperities do not break through the lubricant film -- resulting in minimum friction, therefore, maximum LDH.

Details of the development of metal transfer and friction were studied by drawing cold-rolled bare, galvannealed, electrogalvanized, and hot-dip galvanized strips with a mineral-oil lubricant of 30 cSt viscosity at 40 C, over a total distance of 2500 mm by three methods. An initial high friction peak was associated with metal transfer to the beads and was largest with pure zinc and smallest with Fe-Zn coatings. Insertion of a new strip disturbed the coating and led to the development of secondary peaks. Long-term trends were governed by the stability of the coating. Stearic acid added to mineral oil delayed stabilization of the coating and increased contact area and thus friction with pure zinc surfaces. The usual practice of reporting average friction values can hide valuable information on lubrication mechanisms and metal transfer.

In API engine oil licensing, a candidate oil must meet the performance requirements of category defined engine tests. The reason for the engine tests is to assess the capability of the candidate oil in field performance. Unfortunately, due to the time consuming and expensive nature of most engine tests, a candidate oil is typically run only once or twice in an attempt to meet the performance requirements. Given that the results from most engine tests have large amounts of variability, the assessment of the candidate oil in several tests, although adequate, is obviously not perfect or inexpensive. The Virtual Engine Test is a process in which the time and expense of category defined engine tests may be reduced while maintaining, or even improving, the assessment of the candidate oil capability.

A series plug-in hybrid electric powertrain with all-wheel drive is designed using real-world drive cycles as part of the EcoCAR 2 competition. A stock 2013 Chevrolet Malibu Eco is being re-engineered to reduce fuel consumption and emissions while improving consumer acceptability. Waterloo utilizes a 18.9 kWh A123 energy storage system (ESS), which powers two 105 kW TM4 traction motors. A 2.4 L LE9 General Motors coupled to a 105 kW TM4 motor provides range extending performance. Each step of the design process is discussed, including a novel approach to powertrain selection and controls requirement selection that uses real-world drive cycles. The mechanical integration and unique ESS design is also discussed.

Historically, vehicle fluid condition has been monitored by measuring miles driven or hours operated. Many current vehicles have more sophisticated monitoring methods that use additional variables such as fuel consumption, engine temperature and engine revolutions to predict fluid condition. None of these monitoring means, however, actually measures a fluid property to determine condition, and that is about to change. New sensors and diagnostic systems are being developed that allow real time measurement of some lubricant physical and/or chemical properties and interpret the results in order to recommend oil change intervals and maximize performance. Many of these new sensors use electrochemical or acoustic wave technologies. This paper examines the use of these two technologies to determine engine oil condition and focuses on the effects of lubricant chemistry on interpreting the results.

The work presented here is the second of two papers investigating the KA24E engine test. The first paper characterized the KA24E engine in terms of the physical and chemical operating environment it presents to lubricants. The authors investigated oil degradation and wear mechanisms, and examined the differences between the KA24E and the Sequence VE engine tests. It was shown that while the KA24E does not degrade the lubricant to the extent that occurs in the Sequence VE, wear could be a serious problem if oils are poorly formulated. This second paper examines the wear response of the KA24E to formulation variables. A statistically designed matrix demonstrated that the KA24E is sensitive to levels of secondary zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDP), dispersant and calcium sulfonate detergent. This matrix also showed that the KA24E appears to have good repeatability for well formulated oils and is a reasonable replacement for the wear component of the Sequence VE.

The Nissan KA24E engine test is designated to replace the Ford Sequence VE engine test as the low temperature valve train wear requirement for ILSAC (International Lubricant Standardization and Approval Committee) GF-3. The KA24E (recently designated the Sequence IV A) represents much of the current world-wide material and design technology while retaining the sliding cam/follower contact found in earlier engine designs. The work presented here is the first of two reports. In this first report, the physical and chemical environment the KA24E engine presents a lubricant is characterized and compared to those of the Sequence VE engine. Valve train materials and wear modes are investigated and described. Although chemical analysis of drain oils indicate the KA24E procedure does not degrade the lubricant to the extent seen in the Sequence VE test, valve train wear appears to proceed in a similar manner in both tests.

The development and calibration of stress state-dependent failure criteria for advanced high-strength steel (AHSS) and aluminum alloys requires characterization under proportional loading conditions. Traditional tests to construct a forming limit diagram (FLD), such as Marciniak or Nakazima tests, are based upon identifying the onset of strain localization or a tensile instability (neck). However, the onset of localization is strongly dependent on the through-thickness strain gradient that can delay or suppress the formation of a tensile instability so that cracking may occur before localization. As a result, the material fracture limit becomes the effective forming limit in deformation modes with severe through-thickness strain gradients, and this is not considered in the traditional FLD. In this study, a novel bending test apparatus was developed based upon the VDA 238-100 specification to characterize fracture in plane strain bending using digital image correlation (DIC).

Throughout the evolution of the automobile, passenger car motor oils have been developed to address issues of wear, corrosion, deposit formation, friction, and viscosity stability. As a result, the internal combustion engines are now developed with the expectation that the lubricants to be used in them will deliver certain performance attributes. Metallurgies, clearances, and built-in stresses are all chosen with certain expectations from the lubricant. A family of chemicals that has been universally used in formulating passenger car motor oils is zinc dithiophosphates (ZDPs). ZDPs are extremely effective at protecting highly stressed valve train components against wear failure, especially in engine designs with a sliding contact between cams and followers. While ZDPs' benefits on wear control are universally accepted, ZDPs have been identified as the source of phosphorus, which deactivates noble metal aftertreatment systems.

Global emission legislations for diesel engines are becoming increasingly stringent. While the exhaust gas composition requirements for prior iterations of emission legislation could be met with improvements in the engine's combustion process, the next issue of European, North American and Japanese emission limits greater than 2005 will require more rigorous measures, mainly employment of exhaust gas aftertreatment systems. As a result, many American diesel OEMs are considering NOx adsorbers as a means to achieve 2007+ emission standards. Since the efficacy of a NOx adsorber over its lifetime is significantly affected by sulfur (“sulfur poisoning”), forthcoming reductions in diesel fuel sulfur (down to 15 ppm), have raised industry concerns regarding compatibility and possible poisoning effects of sulfur from the lubricant.

The performance characteristics of a commercial lean-NOX trap catalyst were evaluated between 200 and 500°C, using H2, CO, and a mixture of both H2 and CO as reductants before and after different high-temperature aging steps, from 600 to 750°C. Tests included NOX reduction efficiency during cycling, NOX storage capacity (NSC), oxygen storage capacity (OSC), and water-gas-shift (WGS) and NO oxidation reaction extents. The WGS reaction extent at 200 and 300°C was negatively affected by thermal degradation, but at 400 and 500°C no significant change was observed. Changes in the extent of NO oxidation did not show a consistent trend as a function of thermal degradation. The total NSC was tested at 200, 350 and 500°C. Little change was observed at 500°C with thermal degradation but a steady decrease was observed at 350°C as the thermal degradation temperature was increased.

This study relates the structural stiffness and kinetic energy of impact to the dynamic response of a belted vehicle occupant. Acceleration time histories of impact for structures with different stiffnesses were obtained by performing a finite element analysis using the LS-DYNA3D finite element program and a model representing a structural member made of AISI 4340 steel. For the human body dynamics analysis, the Articulated Total Body (ATB) computer program was used to perform six simulations of a 50 percentile male restrained by a 3-point seatbelt system for a co-linear -Gx impact.

A cold worked and induction hardened SAE1045 steel component exhibited excessive distortion after cold working and straightening, as well as cracking during straightening after induction hardening. Since the problems occurred only in certain heats of electric furnace (EF) steel, in which nitrogen content can vary widely and in some cases be quite high, and never occurred for basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steel for which nitrogen contents are uniformly low it was suspected that the source of the problem was low temperature nitrogen strain aging in heats of EF steel with a high nitrogen content. The measured distortion and mechanical properties at various stages in the fabrication process showed that while nitrogen content had no significant effect on the hot rolled steel the component distortion and strength after cold working and after induction hardening increased with increasing nitrogen content.