Search Results

The automobile industry is making huge strides to improve vehicle and occupant safety. A lot of safety improvements and modifications have been made in the past decade. But the side impact is still overlooked as not much has been improved for side safety despite most of the accidents and collisions happen to the side of a vehicle. Door intrusion barriers are the primary protection feature along with A, B and C pillars. Crashworthiness mainly depends on the position, cross-section and material of the intrusion barrier. So, our work mainly focuses on finding the optimum position, choosing the correct cross-section and finding the right material for the intrusion barrier. The objective of this project is to minimize the damage to the side of the vehicle by increasing its crashworthiness thereby reducing passenger injuries.

The present research deals with study of pongamia oil methyl ester as a lubricant by blending with anti-wear additive ZDDP. The experimental work carried in this work aims to investigates the friction and wear characteristics by blending zinc diakyldithio phosphates (ZDDP) with pongamia oil methyl ester as lubricant under various loading conditions and temperatures. The coefficient of friction and wear scar depth were determined using pongamia biodiesel blended with 0.3%, 0.6% and 1 % ZDDP by concentration through high frequency reciprocating wear testing machine for 2 h duration. The reciprocating wear tests were performed on an engine liner-piston ring contact under the loads of 40 N, 60 N and 80 N for 2 h duration at temperatures of 100°C, 125°C 150° C with 10 Hz oscillation frequency. The addition of ZDDP with pongamia biodiesel showed marginal reduction in friction coefficient and wear scar depth under all loads and temperatures.

In the pioneering sectors of design and development, industries are looking for computer integrated solutions for product development; especially in aerospace industries where the demands for reduction in the development cycles and prototyping iterations. Generative design and topology optimization are the recent tools for achieving the desired design solutions. Topology optimization aims to find an ideal structural configuration within the given design domain with various constraints, objectives, and boundary conditions. In this study, topology optimization is used as a design tool in the development phase of a component. An efficient methodology is developed based on topology optimization for regeneration of a tertiary components. The topology optimization approach used in this research is divided into three main stages: modelling, optimization and regeneration.

Though high thermal conductivity polymer composites are prepared based on the thermal requirements, the effectiveness and overall heat transfer performance of the radiators have to be addressed comprehensively to validate the concerned efforts taken to prepare the high thermal conductivity polymer composites. In this article, theoretical analysis on the thermal performance of the cross flow type heat exchanger under convection is performed only by concentrating on the term thermal conductivity of the material. Micro channel based geometry is extracted from the given heat exchanger problem to reduce the complexities of simulation. The term cooling system performance index (CSPI) is used to achieve the expected targets in the present investigation. For shorter fins, the effect of thermal conductivity on the cooling system performance index under lower Reynolds number is insignificant.

In additive manufacturing, lasercusing is the selective laser melting technique. Finely pulverized metal is melted using a high-energy fibre laser, by Island principle strategy produces mechanically and thermally stable metallic components with reduced thermal gradients, stresses & at high precision. Maraging steel 300 (18Ni-300) is an iron-nickel steel alloy often used in applications requires high fracture toughness and strength. It maintains dimensional changes at a minimal level, e.g. aircraft and aerospace industries for rocket motor castings and landing gear or tooling applications. Current research attempts to analyze the effect of laser shock peening on lasercused material. Surface roughness of the material was found to be increased by 8%, due to effect of laser shock pulse & ablative nature. Also 8% increase in macro hardness on the surface.

In the present study, an aluminium based nanocomposite, reinforced with 2 wt. % aluminium oxide (Al2O3) is developed through stir casting method. These hard ceramic particles also influence the material removal rate (MRR), electrode wear rate (EWR) and surface finish (Ra) in an electro-discharge machining (EDM) process. In this work, EDM of Al 7075/2 wt. % Al2O3 nanocomposite is carried out using copper and brass electrodes using Taguchi L18 array. The percentage contribution of each process parameter on the response variables was determined using analysis of variance (ANOVA). Multi-response signal to noise ratio (MRSN) and the optimum combination levels for the input parameters was obtained using Taguchi’s parametric design. MRR and surface roughness are substantially improved when machining is performed at optimized conditions.

The use of thermoplastics in various fields like aerospace, automotive, medical and packaging industries is growing day by day, due to their light weight and compactness. In some instances, the plastic components are required to be welded. In this research study, process parameters used for the ultrasonic welding of thermoplastics which produces highest weld strength for complex use in the above said applications is carried out. Also, the possibilities of welding dissimilar plastics are also tested. Tensile testing of above welded samples fabricated through injection moulding was carried out for all possible welds and the ultimate tensile strength was calculated in each case. Of all the welded specimens, at given parameters like weld time, weld pressure and energy director, it is observed that ultimate tensile strength of ABS (8.89 N/mm2) is highest.

The FSAE is a world-renowned competition, in which students from across the globe compete against each other. The chassis is the main framework of the car, which is inherently responsible for accommodating all the components. The chassis is broadly classified into two types—monocoque and spaceframe. The FSAE chassis is of spaceframe type. The chassis also provides structural rigidity to the body of the car. It was observed through literature study that very minimal amount of research has been done on analyzing and validating the chassis by applying the different meshing techniques, namely 1D, 2D, and 3D. The mesh quality is very essential to obtain precise results and hence, effective methods for creating the mesh have been dealt with in this article. This study is on new investigations on different meshing techniques that can be implemented on an FSAE chassis.

Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) is a rapid prototyping technique used to fabricate and repair metallic prototypes. It can be used in the production of complex geometries and unique parts. In functional automotive applications wear characteristics hold key importance. In the present study, an analysis on the influence of various parameters (coating thickness, load and temperature) on the wear characteristics of Direct Metal Deposited (DMD) Inconel 625 coating has been carried out using a Design of Experiments (DOE). ANOVA calculations were performed to find out which of these parameters showed significant influence on the wear properties. It was found that load was the most significant parameter influencing the wear characteristics .Similarly load was found to be most influencing parameter for co efficient of friction. The trend was found to follow when verified at 30 second, 3 minutes, 60 minutes and 120 minutes.

A study of an aerofoil structure used for automotive body design is being conducted and an experiment has been performed to determine the lift and drag forces produced by it by varying its Angle of Attack. The NACA0018 and NACA0015 aerofoil with a chord length of 16 cm were used for this study. Then an analysis was done with the help of (CFD) computational fluid dynamics. The results obtained by CFD analysis where compared by the experimental results which was performed on wind tunnel using NACA0018 aerofoil. The results are then presented graphically, showing pressure and velocity distributions lift and drag coefficients for the different cases which will be useful for design of automotive body structures.

This paper describes the design methodology and algorithm development towards the design of an automatic external gear-shifting and clutch-actuation system for a sequential gearbox with the aim of providing the drivers with easier and an efficient means of shifting gears. Automatically actuated manual transmission system bridges the gap between automatic and manual transmissions which provides the advantages of both type of transmissions. This would ideally leads to faster shifting time and provide significant benefits in the form of electronic-aids like launch control and traction control. Removal of mechanical clutching would reduce fatigue and lead to ergonomic benefit. Based on the benchmarking performed on an easily available ready-to-install aftermarket alternative, options will be considered for the actuating mechanism and the most feasible will be used to develop a shifting system.

This paper describes the development of a varying stiffness suspension system to have better control over handling, comfort and structural fatigue of automobiles. Earlier approaches resulted in cumbersome designs and resulted in higher lateral forces on coil springs and structural fatigue. In this work, an initiative has been taken considering all these factors and optimizing the design at every stage of development to achieve lightweight and economical suspension system to meet the objectives. The variable stiffness is achieved through the relative travel of spring with respect to the wheel travel for different configurations. For this purpose, a stepper motor drive is employed to move the hinge point in the angular arch. The developed design is also examined through mathematical modeling and the MBD simulations.

The increasing demand for light weighting products due to introduction of various standards and norms for controlling CO2 emissions and to meet the customer requirement of low cost with higher strength and rigidity of product in automotive industry, sheet metal manufacturing technique is adopted for automotive steering yoke for light commercial vehicle. Currently forged yokes are used for higher strength requirement, while sheet metal yokes are being used for small tonnage vehicle. The attempt has been made to improve overall strength and rigidity of the yoke produced by sheet metal operation using SAPH 440 steel with 6.5mm thickness for light commercial vehicle segments. The major challenge identified for this development was developing such a high strength and thickness material with consistency of dimension during forming process and meeting the torsional strength requirement of 500 Nm.

The present work is concentrated to study the effect of varying inlet pressures on the dynamics of the suction valve obtained from a hermetic reciprocating compressor. The effect of valve functioning on the efficiency of a compressor is highly acceptable. Rather than the delivery valve, the suction valve has a significant impact on the compressor efficiency. The reed valve in a hermetic compressor is a cantilever type arrangement. The valve operates due to the pressure difference between the suction muffler and the cylinder. The numerical analysis which includes Fluid-structure interaction is used in the present study. The flow and structural domain employed in the present study are modelled with Solidworks 15.0. The fluid structure interaction analysis is a combination of ANSYS Fluent and ANSYS structural. These two are coupled with a system coupling in ANSYS Workbench 16.0. The numerical results obtained from the simulation are validated with the experimental data.

With the ever increasing emphasis on vehicle occupant safety, the safety of pedestrians is getting obscured behind the A-pillars that are expanding in order to meet the federal roof crush standards. The serious issue of pillar blind spots poses threats to the pedestrians who easily disappear from driver's field of view. To recognize this blinding danger and design the car around the driver's eye, this paper proposes the implementation of Aluminum Oxynitride marked under name AlON by Surmet Corporation for fabrication of A-pillars that can allow more than 80% visibility through them. AlON is a polycrystalline ceramic with cubic spinel crystal structure and is composed of aluminum, oxygen and nitrogen. With hardness more than 85% than sapphire, its applications range from aerospace to defense purposes which qualify it in terms of strength and thus imply that it can be conveniently used as A-pillars in vehicles. Furthermore, it possesses characteristics of being bonded to metals as well.