Search Results

The commercial vehicle industry is evolving faster with the rise in multifarious aspects deciding a company's progress. In the current scenario, vehicle performance and its reliability in the areas of payload, fuel economy, etc. play vital roles in determining its sustenance in the industry, in addition to reducing driver fatigue and improving comfort levels. Test quality and time is the key to assure and affirm, smooth and quick launch of the product into the market. This paper details on the design of Multi-Axis road data simulator which entails realistic loads onto the components for capturing meaningful information on behavior of the product and recreate the field failure modes. The design was conceptualized keeping in mind both cost (for initial installation and running cost) and time for testing without loss in the convergence factor.

CABIN design is continuously undergoing a huge change for reasons of customer comfort on for meeting regulatory requirement. Consequently the strategic design process will not only consider need for high strength structures but a pragmatic research based approach utilizing the latest technology. Though cab structure is built by a sheet metal blank as per the required dimensions, some locations encounter great amounts of stress and must be designed to withstand the same in a durable way. A possible simpler practice would be to add reinforcements in the high stress area or use high strength material for the entire part. However in this approach weight and cost of the component will be increased. As the weight of the Cabin, vehicle increases this will impact fuel efficiency. Attempts have been taken like using composite materials.

All automotive components undergo stringent testing protocol during the design validation phase. Nevertheless, there are certain components in the field which are seldom captured during design validation. One of these components is the battery isolator switch. This project aims at optimizing a validation methodology for this component based on field usage and conditions. The isolator switch is the main control switch which connects and disconnects the electrical loads from the battery. This switch is used in the electrical circuit of the vehicle to prevent unwanted draining of battery when it is not needed and when the vehicle is in switched off. An electrical version of this switch uses electromagnetic coils to short the contacts. The failure mode being investigated is a high current load causing the input and output terminal to be welded.

In the past decades, many impressive progress has been made in the rig development for the gear validation. But, the challenges are to test the entire gear box for the improvement in the single gear alone to ascertain material quality or process improvement, that too with the higher torque range gear boxes, which requires huge investment and power consumption due to high capacity test rig / dynamometer. This paper deals with an experimental validation of the dynamic model for a gear pair test system, representative of a closed loop power recirculating type test rig. Being a closed loop, this system has its own uniqueness, that, it uses the low capacity prime mover, which considers the initial starting loop torque only, to cater the high power requirement in an efficient manner. The key intend of the development of this rig is to reduce the testing from system level to sub component level with low cost operation and more competence for the gears of high torque application.

In the automotive industry, thermal management plays a very important role to solve the problems of energy saving and emission. The under hood thermal management is one of the critical aspects in vehicle thermal management since it caters to critical aspects of engine cooling, charge air cooling, air conditioning and turbocharger cooling. The appropriate thermal management of these critical components is necessary for ensuring the appropriate performance by the vehicle. Hence, under-hood thermal management is the core of the integrated vehicle thermal management. In the thermal management analysis approaches, the numerical simulation is widely adopted as an important approach. Hence, in this paper a model is developed in MATLAB to handle 1D parametric analysis of the cooling system, while reducing the testing time and resources taken for the product development. The developed model can be used to evaluate multiple aggregate options for CAC, Radiator, Engine, Fan etc.

In today’s commercial vehicle scenario, designing and developing a component which will never fail throughout its lifespan is next to impossible. For a long time especially in the field of automotive, any crack initiation shall deem the component as failed and the design requires further modification. This paper deals with studying the failure of one such component and understanding the effect the crack has on the overall life of the component i.e. understanding the remnant life of the component. The component under study was gear shift lever bracket and is mounted on the engine exhaust manifold. It experiences two types of loads: inertial load due to the engine vibration and gear shift load. Frequent failures were observed in the field and in order to simulate it at lab, an accelerated test approach was adopted. The engine operating speed was used to identify the possible excitation frequency which the component might experience.

Engines of commercial vehicles deliver significant amount of power (more than 25% of propulsive power) for non-propulsive loads such as air-conditioner, alternator, air compressor, radiator fan, steering oil pump, lights etc. Use of these auxiliaries cause sub-optimal utilization of engine power resulting in increased fuel consumption and emissions. A fuel cell powered auxiliary power unit (FC-APU) is proposed to isolate the auxiliaries from the engine. Use of FC-APU shall help improve load carrying capacity, gradeability, fuel efficiency and emissions of the vehicle. This paper describes a mathematical system level model developed using MATLAB-SIMULINK to estimate auxiliary power consumption and simulate FC-APU system. A statistical analysis is performed on the power consumed by various auxiliaries during different duty cycles. The data is used to propose a FC- APU system. Fuel cell is the most expensive component in the system.

High currents flowing through various traces of a printed circuit boards (PCB) causes thermal run away and PCB warpage due to the occurrence of high heat density. The present study discusses on steady state thermal analysis performed in a PCB kept inside an enclosure. Thermal analysis allows PCB designer to quickly move and confirm the component’s placement by examining the temperature plots predicted on the PCB surface. A PCB particularly designed for automated manual transmission (AMT) application employed in Ashok Leyland electric vehicle (EV) trucks is used for this present study. The performed simulations are preliminary level and carried out with commercially available software Altair Simlab ElectroFlo 2022.3. Simlab is a PCB level EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software suite used for design and analysis, and thus helps in minimizing the development cycles.

In electric vehicles, Li-ion battery pack is the most expensive subsystem. Therefore, extending the life of the battery pack and thereby reducing the need for battery pack replacement is necessary to offer a viable product at a competitive cost of ownership. Thermal management of battery pack plays an important role in achieving the above mentioned objective since the performance and life of lithium ion batteries is greatly influenced by temperature. There are various thermal management strategies available to keep the temperature under control like air cooling, chilled liquid cooling and hybrid cooling systems. In this paper, a comparison between phase change material (PCM) and PCM/liquid hybrid cooling is made. The result of the study to understand the applicability of PCM for thermal management of Li-ion batteries is presented. CFD thermal analysis under constant electrical load of 1C rate is carried out.