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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.

A correlation of aerodynamic wind tunnels was initiated between Chrysler, Ford and General Motors under the umbrella of the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR). The wind tunnels used in this correlation were the open jet tunnel at Chrysler's Aero Acoustic Wind Tunnel (AAWT), the open jet tunnel at the Jacobs Drivability Test Facility (DTF) that Ford uses, and the closed jet tunnel at General Motors Aerodynamics Laboratory (GMAL). Initially, existing non-competitive aerodynamic data was compared to determine the feasibility of facility correlation. Once feasibility was established, a series of standardized tests with six vehicles were conducted at the three wind tunnels. The size and body styles of the six vehicles were selected to cover the spectrum of production vehicles produced by the three companies. All vehicles were tested at EPA loading conditions. Despite the significant differences between the three facilities, the correlation results were very good.

An autonomous vehicle is a comprehensive intelligent system that includes environment sensing, vehicle localization, path planning and decision-making control, of which environment sensing technology is a prerequisite for realizing autonomous driving. In the early days, vehicles sensed the surrounding environment through sensors such as cameras, radar, and lidar. With the development of 5G technology and the Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), other information from the roadside can also be received by vehicles. Such as traffic jam ahead, construction road occupation, school area, current traffic density, crowd density, etc. Such information can help the autonomous driving system understand the current driving environment more clearly. Vehicles are no longer limited to areas that can be sensed by sensors. Vehicles with different autonomous driving levels have different adaptability to the environment.

The RON(Research Octane Number) is the most important indicator of motor petrol, and the petrol refining process is one of the important links in petrol production. However, RON is often lost during petrol refining and RON Loss means the value of RON lost during petrol refining. The prediction of the RON loss of petrol during the refining process is helpful to the improvement of petrol refining process and the processing of petrol. The traditional RON prediction method relied on physical and chemical properties, and did not fully consider the high nonlinearity and strong coupling relationship of the petrol refining process. There is a lack of data-driven RON loss models. This paper studies the construction of the RON loss model in the petrol refining process.

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.

A feasible method was developed to reconstruct the three-dimensional flame surface of SI combustion based on 2D images. A double-window constant volume vessel was designed to simultaneously obtain the side and bottom images of the flame. The flame front was reconstructed based on 2D images with a slicing model, in which the flame characteristics were derived by slicing flame contour modeling and flame-piston collision area analysis. The flame irregularity and anisotropy were also analyzed. Two different principles were used to build the slicing model, the ellipse hypothesis modeling and deep learning modeling, in which the ellipse hypothesis modeling was applied to reconstruct the flame in the optical SI engine. And the reconstruction results were analyzed and discussed. The reconstruction results show that part of the wrinkled and folded structure of the flame front in SI engines can be revealed based on the bottom view image.

This paper describes a computerized value analysis tool (VAT) developed to aid automotive interior designers, engineers and planners to achieve the high levels of perceived quality of materials used in automotive door trim panels. The model requires a number of inputs related to types of materials, their manufacturing processes and customer perceived quality ratings, costs and importance of materials, features located in different areas of the door trim panel, etc. It allows the user to conduct iterative evaluation of total cost, total weighted customer perceived quality ratings, and estimates of perceived value (perceived quality divided by cost) for different door trim areas as well as the entire door trim panel. The VAT, thus, allows value and cost management related to materials and processing choices for automotive interiors.

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.

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.

This paper presents the application of statistical process control (SPC) methods to Windshear, a 180-mph motorsports and automotive wind tunnel equipped with a wide-belt rolling road system. The SPC approach captures the complete variability of the facility and offers useful process performance metrics that are based on a sound statistical framework. Traditional control charts are explored, emphasizing the uniqueness of variability experienced in wind tunnels which includes significant, unexplained short-term and long-term variation compared to typical manufacturing processes. This unique variation is elegantly captured by the three-way control chart, which is applied to estimate the complete process reproducibility with different levels of repeatability of vehicle drag coefficient. The sensitivity of three-way control charts is explored including the evaluation of an alternate group assignment within the same dataset.

This paper proposes a model-based “Cascaded Dual Extended Kalman Filter” (CDEKF) for combined vehicle state estimation, namely, tire vertical forces and parameter identification. A sensitivity analysis is first carried out to recognize the vehicle inertial parameters that have significant effects on tire normal forces. Next, the combined estimation process is separated in two components. The first component is designed to identify the vehicle mass and estimate the longitudinal forces while the second component identifies the location of center of gravity and estimates the tire normal forces. A Dual extended Kalman filter is designed for each component for combined state estimation and parameter identification. Simulation results verify that the proposed method can precisely estimate the tire normal forces and accurately identify the inertial parameters.

Recent research has shown that butanol, instead of ethanol, has the potential of introducing a more suitable blend in diesel engines. This is because butanol has properties similar to current transportation fuels in comparison to ethanol. However, the main downside is the high cost of the butanol production process. Acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) is an intermediate product of the fermentation process of butanol production. By eliminating the separation and purification processes, using ABE directly in diesel blends has the potential of greatly decreasing the overall cost for fuel production. This could lead to a vast commercial use of ABE-diesel blends on the market. Much research has been done in the past five years concerning spray and combustion processes of both neat ABE and ABE-diesel mixtures. Additionally, different compositions of ABE mixtures had been characterized with a similar experimental approach.

Crankshaft bearings function to maintain the lubrication oil films needed to support crankshaft journals in hydrodynamic regime of rotation. Discontinuous oil films will cause the journal-bearing couple to be in a mixed or boundary lubrication condition, or even a bearing seizure or a spun bearing. This condition may further force the crankshaft to break and an engine shutdown. Spun bearings have been identified to be one of the top reasons in field returned engines. Excessive investigations have found large, embedded hard debris particles on the bearings are inevitably the culprit of destroying continuity of the oil films. Those particles, in particular the suspicious steel residues, in the sizes of hundreds of micrometers, are large enough to cause oil film to break, but rather fine and challenging for materials engineers to characterize their metallurgical features. This article presents the methodology and steps of debris analyses on bearings at different stages of engine build.

Seat lateral support is often talked about as a design parameter, but usually in terms of psychological perception. There are many difficulties in quantifying lateral support mechanically to the engineering teams: Anthropometric variation causes different people to interact with the seat in different places and at different angles, BPD studies are usually planar and don’t distinguish between horizontal support and vertical resistance to sinking in, most mechanical test systems are typically single-DOF and can’t apply vertical and horizontal loads concurrently, and there is scant literature describing the actual lateral loads of occupants. In this study, we characterize the actual lateral loading on example seating from various sized/shaped occupants according to dynamic pressure distribution. From this information, a six-DOF load and position control test robot (KUKA OccuBot) is used to replicate that pressure distribution.

For the purpose of lessening fuel consumption, engine noise, shift jerk and clutch friction work in the shift process of Automatic Mechanical Transmission (AMT), a fuzzy-bang bang dual mode control strategy for engine rotate speed is put forward in this paper, which takes the advantages of time optimal control and fuzzy control. The combined control strategy is applied to the shift process control of AMT test minibus named SC6350 and proved to be successful by the experimental results.

This paper presents cost-benefit analysis of glass and carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic matrix composites for structural automotive applications based on press forming operation. Press forming is very similar to stamping operation for steel. The structural automotive applications involve beam type components. The part selected for a case study analysis is a crossbeam support for instrument panels.

The implementation of electronic shifters (e-shifter) for automatic transmissions in vehicles has created many new opportunities for the customer facing transmission interface and in-vehicle packaging. E-shifters have become popular in recent years as their smaller physical size leads to packaging advantages, they reduce the mass of the automatic transmission shift system, they are easier to install during vehicle assembly, and act as an enabler for autonomous driving. A button-style e-shifter has the ability to create a unique customer interface to the automatic transmission, as it is very different from the conventional column lever or linear console shifter. In addition to this, a button-style e-shifter can free the center console of valuable package space for other customer-facing functions, such as storage bins and Human-Machine Interface controllers.