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With the advent of this new era of electric-driven automobiles, the simulation and virtual digital twin modeling world is now embarking on new sets of challenges. Getting key insights into electric motor behavior has a significant impact on the net output and range of electric vehicles. In this paper, a complete 3D CFD model of an Electric Motor is developed to understand its churning losses at different operating speeds. The simulation study details how the flow field develops inside this electric motor at different operating speeds and oil temperatures. The contributions of the crown and weld endrings, crown and weld end-windings, and airgap to the net churning loss are also analyzed. The oil distribution patterns on the end-windings show the effect of the centrifugal effect in scrapping oil from the inner structures at higher speeds. Also, the effect of the sump height with higher operating speeds are also analyzed.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are being developed for more and more complicated application scenarios, which often require more predictive strategies with better understanding of driving environment. Taking traffic vehicles’ maneuvers into account can greatly expand the beforehand time span for danger awareness. This paper presents a maneuver-based strategy to vehicle collision threat assessment. First, a maneuver-based trajectory prediction model (MTPM) is built, in which near-future trajectories of ego vehicle and traffic vehicles are estimated with the combination of vehicle’s maneuvers and kinematic models that correspond to every maneuver. The most probable maneuvers of ego vehicle and each traffic vehicles are modeled and inferred via Hidden Markov Models with mixture of Gaussians outputs (GMHMM). Based on the inferred maneuvers, trajectory sets consisting of vehicles’ position and motion states are predicted by kinematic models.

Fuel chemistry plays a crucial role in the continued reduction of particulate emissions (PE) and cleaner air quality from vehicles and equipment powered by internal combustion engines (ICE). Over the past ten years, there have been great improvements in predictive particulate emissions indices (correlative mathematical models) based on the fuel’s composition. Examples of these particulate indices (PI) are the Honda Particulate Matter Index (PMI) and the General Motors Particulate Evaluation Index (PEI). However, the analytical chemistry lab methods used to generate data for these two PI indices are very time-consuming. Because gasoline can be mixtures of hundreds of hydrocarbon compounds, these lab methods typically include the use of the high resolution chromatographic separation techniques such as detailed hydrocarbon analysis (DHA), with 100m chromatography columns and long (3 - 4 hours) analysis times per sample.

The design and development of electric vehicles involves many unique challenges. One such challenge involves accurately predicting driveline abuse torque loads early in the design cycle to aid with sizing drive-unit and driveline components. Since electrified drivelines typically lack a torque-limiting “fuse” element such as a torque converter or slipping clutch, they can be vulnerable to sudden transient events involving high wheel acceleration or deceleration. Component sizing must account for the loads caused by such events, and these loads must be accurately quantified early on when vehicle parameters haven’t been finalized yet. Early load predictions can be made by completing abuse maneuver simulations where key parameters are varied to gauge their influence on simulated loads. Understanding how these parameters impact loads allows for better risk assessment during the design process, as these parameters will inevitably change until a final design is iterated upon.

Speaker performance in Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) plays a crucial role for pedestrian safety. Sound radiation from AVAS speaker has obvious directivity pattern. Considering this feature is critical for accurately simulating the exterior sound field of electrical vehicles. This paper proposes a new process to characterize the sound directivity pattern of AVAS speaker. The first step of the process is to perform an acoustic testing to measure the sound pressure radiated from the speaker at a certain number of microphone locations in a free field environment. Based on the geometry of a virtual speaker, the locations of each microphone and measured sound pressure data, an inverse method, namely the inverse pellicular analysis, is adopted to recover a set of vibration pattern of the virtual speaker surface. The recovered surface vibration pattern can then be incorporated in the full vehicle numerical model as an excitation for simulating the exterior sound field.

Over the decades, several attempts have been made to develop new fatigue analysis methods for welded joints since most of the incidents in automotive structures are joints related. Therefore, a reliable and effective fatigue damage parameter is needed to properly predict the failure location and fatigue life of these welded structures to reduce the hardware testing, time, and the associated cost. The nodal force-based structural stress approach is becoming widely used in fatigue life assessment of welded structures. In this paper, a new nodal force-based structural stress recovery procedure is proposed that uses the least squares method to linearly smooth the stresses in elements along the weld line. Weight function is introduced to give flexibility in choosing different weighting schemes between elements. Two typical weighting schemes are discussed and compared.

Ensuring the robustness of vehicle systems and features is a key aspect of customer satisfaction and therefore is of vital importance to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Both initial quality and quality over the life of the vehicle are important aspects to customers. Therefore, some features and systems require an active approach at monitoring system health. The intent of Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) systems in vehicles is to increase the customer’s perception of vehicle refinement and brand quality. Due to the nature of ANC system operation, it is critical that the system does not go divergent resulting in unwanted noise being heard by the customer. So, a method to monitor the ANC system operation and performance is required to ensure robustness. Despite tuning ANC systems considering expected vehicle build tolerances, vehicle aging and customer specific use cases, an ANC system can occasionally still go divergent in the field.

The overall technology trend of Active Safety and Driver Assistance systems is relatively clear: increasing capability to avoid crashes as well as convenience on a path toward autonomous driving. What's less obvious, though, is the selection of features/technologies will make sense at each step along the path. Specific vehicle contenting decisions get made early in the vehicle planning process and rely on forecasting factors such as technology readiness, consumer interest, the economics in the supply base, and projected government regulations and consumer metrics. Additionally, for these technologies to be effective, often they need to be introduced in conjunction with other features and grouped in ways that are intuitive and relevant to current consumer needs.

Hood insulators are widely used in automotive industry to improve noise insulation, pedestrian impact protection and to provide aesthetic appeal. They are attached below the hood panel and are often complex in shape and size. Pedestrian head impacts are highly dynamic events with a compressive strain rate experienced by the insulator exceeding 300/s. The energy generated by the impact is partly absorbed by the hood insulators thus reducing the head injury to the pedestrian. During this process, the insulator experiences multi-axial stress states. The insulators are usually made of soft multi-layered materials, such as polyurethane or fiberglass, and have a thin scrim layer on either side. These materials are foamed to their nominal thickness and are compression molded to take the required shape of the hood. During this process they undergo thickness reduction, thereby increasing their density.

Euro 7/VII regulations are currently under discussion and are expected to be the last big regulatory step in Europe. From available documentation, it is clear the aim of further regulating the extended conditions of use which are still responsible of high emission events (e. g. cold start or altitude) as well as regulating secondary emissions such as NH3, N2O, CH4, Aldehydes (HCHO). Even if not completely fixed yet, the EU7 limits will be challenging for internal combustion engines and even more for Diesel. Despite a consistent reduction of market share, Diesel engines are expected to remain a significant portion in certain sectors such as Heavy duty (HD) and Light-commercial vehicle (LCV) for some decades. In order to reach the new limits being proposed, besides minimizing engine-out emissions, Diesel powertrain will need an aftertreatment system able to work at very high efficiency right after engine start and in almost every working and environmental condition.

Injury Risk Curves are developed from cadaver data for sternal deflections produced by anterior, distributed chest loads for a 25, 45, 55, 65 and 75 year-old Small Female, Mid-Size Male and Large Male based on the variations of bone strengths with age. These curves show that the risk of AIS ≥ 3 thoracic injury increases with the age of the person. This observation is consistent with NASS data of frontal accidents which shows that older unbelted drivers have a higher risk of AIS ≥ 3 chest injury than younger drivers.

Vehicle manufacturers conduct tests to develop crash sensing system calibrations. Ditch fall-over is one of a suite of laboratory tests used to develop rollover sensing calibrations that can trigger deployment of safety devices like roof rail airbags and seat belt pretensioners. The ditch fall-over test simulates a flat road followed by a ditch on one side of the road. The vehicle heads into the ditch and the driver applies swift steer input once the ditch slope is sensed. Typically, the steer input is applied when the two down-slope wheels on the ditch side enter the ditch. Multi-Body Dynamics (MBD) software can be used for virtual simulation of these test events. Conventionally in simulations, the vehicle-model is run without steer input and the marking line crossing time is observed/manually recorded from observation of simulation video. This recorded time is used to apply the steer input and the full event is then re-simulated.

The Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) is a comprehensive feature set designed to aid a driver in avoiding or reducing the severity of collisions while operating the vehicle within specified conditions. In General Motors (GM) vehicles, the primary controller for the ADAS is the Active Safety Control Module (ASCM). In the 2013 model year, GM introduced an ASCM utilizing the GM internal nomenclature of External Object Calculation Module (EOCM) in some of their vehicles produced for the North American market. Similar to the Sensing and Diagnostic Module (SDM) utilized in the restraints system, the EOCM3 LC contains an Event Data Recorder (EDR) function to capture and record information surrounding certain ADAS or Supplemental Inflatable Restraint (SIR) events. The ASCM EDR contains information from external object sensors, various chassis and powertrain control modules, and internally calculated data.

As the proliferation of downsized boosted engines continues, it becomes increasingly important to understand how engine and vehicle hardware impact vehicle transient response. Several different methodologies can be used to understand hardware impacts, such as vehicle testing, 0-D vehicle models, and constant engine speed load steps. The next evolution of predicting vehicle transient response is to transition to a system level vehicle analysis by coupling a detailed engine model, utilizing crank angle resolved calculations, with a simple vehicle model. This allows for the evaluation of engine and vehicle hardware effects on vehicle acceleration and the rate of change of vehicle acceleration, or jerk, and the tradeoffs that can be made between the hardware in early program development. By comparing this system level vehicle model to the different methodologies, it can be shown that a system level vehicle analysis allows for higher fidelity evaluations of vehicle transient response.

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are becoming more competitive day by day to achieve maximum peak power and energy requirement. This poses challenges to the design of Thermal Interface Material (TIM) which maintains the cell temperature and ensure retention of cell and prevent electrolyte leak under different crash loads. TIM can be in the form of adhesives, gels, gap fillers. In this paper, TIM is considered as structural, and requires design balance with respect to thermal and mechanical requirements. Improving structural strength of TIM will have negative impact on its thermal conductivity; hence due care needs to be taken to determine optimal strength that meets both structural and thermal performance. During various crash conditions, due to large inertial force of cell and module assembly, TIM is undertaking significant loads on tensile and shear directions. LS-DYNA® is used as simulation solver for performing crash loading conditions and evaluate structural integrity of TIM.

Casting is the ability to let users transfer their favorite videos, music, movies, etc. from their phone to a chosen display. This functionality has become very popular these days, and to the user, it is as simple as clicking a button. This “simple” task is a complex system that requires various independent sources to communicate efficiently and effectively to produce a robust and reliable output. The sending and receiving devices are required to be on the same network - which involves reliable and secure connection. This allows the sending of the URL of the chosen feature to the server provider, which will then connect to the receiver embedded electronics where the authentication process that protects Digital Rights Management (DRM) is established. In the era of developing autonomous and luxury vehicles, this technology has the potential to add a new dimension of in-vehicle entertainment that could come very close to the home experience.

To achieve high robustness and quality, automotive ECUs must initialize from low-power states as quickly as possible. However, microprocessor and memory advances have failed to keep pace with software image size growth in complex ECUs such as in Infotainment and Telematics. Loading the boot image from non-volatile storage to RAM and initializing the software can take a very long time to show the first screen and result in sluggish performance for a significant time thereafter which both degrade customer perceived quality. Designers of mobile devices such as portable phones, laptops, and tablets address this problem using Suspend mode whereby the main processor and peripheral devices are powered down during periods of inactivity, but memory contents are preserved by a small “self-refresh” current. When the device is turned back “on”, fully initialized memory content allows the system to initialize nearly instantaneously.

Level 2 (L2) partial driving automation systems are rapidly emerging in the marketplace. L2 systems provide sustained automatic longitudinal and lateral vehicle motion control, reducing the need for drivers to continuously brake, accelerate and steer. Drivers, however, remain critically responsible for safely detecting and responding to objects and events. This paper summarizes variations of L2 systems (hands-on and/or hands-free) and considers human drivers’ roles when using L2 systems and for designing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), including Driver Monitoring Systems (DMSs). In addition, approaches for examining potential unintended consequences of L2 usage and evaluating L2 HMIs, including field safety effect examination, are reviewed. The aim of this paper is to guide L2 system HMI development and L2 system evaluations, especially in the field, to support safe L2 deployment, promote L2 system improvements, and ensure well-informed L2 policy decision-making.

General Motors (GM) vehicle design operations group has envisioned that all designers and Design Engineers (DEs) should be able to analyze simple and single components and produce robust subsystem parts to support full vehicle system analysis. This vision is achieved by developing the Smart Simulation Tool (SST) within the Siemens NX CAD system. This tool empowers the designers to take charge of simple parts and produce high quality parts first time. This tool will also make both design and engineering analysis organizations at General Motors more efficient and productive. This paper describes the Smart Simulation Tool that was developed to automate the pre and post processing tasks of the Siemens NX Advanced Simulation process. Generally, the simulation process consumes a lot of designer’s time for building the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) models, typically one to two hours and is very tedious and has the potential for errors.

In 1983, General Motors Corporation (GM) petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to allow the use of the biofidelic Hybrid III midsize adult male dummy as an alternate test device for FMVSS 208 compliance testing of frontal impact, passive restraint systems. To support their petition, GM made public to the international automotive community the limit values that they imposed on the Hybrid III measurements, which were called Injury Assessment Reference Values (IARVs). During the past 20 years, these IARVs have been updated based on relevant biomechanical studies that have been published and scaled to provide IARVs for the Hybrid III and CRABI families of frontal impact dummies. Limit values have also been developed for the biofidelic side impact dummies, BioSID, ES-2 and SID-IIs.