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A hydraulic power train assembly of an agricultural tractor is meant to lift the heavy implements during field operations and transportation. As it is a crucial member of the tractor for its usage, so the power train assembly needs a properly designed lift arm, rocker arm assembly with better strength and stiffness. There are a standard like IS12224, IS4468 which regulates the test method for hydraulic power and lift capacity of tractor and the layout of hydraulic three point linkage. Computer aided engineering techniques followed by laboratory testing have been deployed in the earlier stages of the product design & development itself to deliver the first time right products to the customer. In this paper, a virtual simulation process has been established to design an agricultural tractor hydraulic lift arm to meet the above requirements. A Design Verification Plan (DVP) has been developed consisting of 3 load cases.

Melatonin, otherwise popularly known as the “sleep hormone” is known to govern the human circadian rhythms. Current studies indicate that the generation of melatonin is impacted by the ambient light. The natural sleep inducing behavior during night and in darkness, is also due to the same phenomenon. Studies have shown that light of particular wavelengths in the visible spectrum have a higher effect on the amount of melatonin secreted by the human body. Blue light in the wavelengths of around 468 nm is known to inhibit the melatonin secretion, the most. This branch of science known as photobiology is in its nascent stage and is a matter of research pursued by neurologists, endocrinologists and other lighting researchers. Photobiology has several potential applications in the automotive industry, the principal one being driver drowsiness prevention.

This paper presents the analysis and experimental validation of c-spring and its stiffness properties in the gear shift synchronizer system. A synchronizer assembly for a transmission comprises of a synchronizer hub carried by a torque delivery shaft and a cone clutch member carried by a gear and a synchronizer blocking ring. The gear shift sleeve is meshing over the teeth of the clutch hub. The c-spring is positioned in the inner circumference of the rim position of the clutch hub and strut keys will be positioned at the slots on the clutch hub, which are usually 120 degree apart. As the sleeve moves while gear shifting, it pushes down the strut keys which compress the C-spring radially inward; this gives the strut load. The strut keys, which are pushed down by the sleeve, will apply force on the c-spring from radial directions. Since the c-spring is in the shape of an arc it is assumed as a curved beam for the analysis.

In any industry, early detection and mitigation of a failure in component is vital for feasible design changes or development iterations or saving money. So it becomes pivotal to capture the failure mode in an accelerated way. This theory poses many challenges in devising the methodology to validate the failure mode. In real world, vehicle head lamp is exposed to all possible kinds of harsh environments such as variable daily ambient, rain, dust and engine compartment temperature …etc. This brings rapid thermal stress onto headlamp resulting into warpage cracks. At vehicle level on particular model, this failure is typically observed after 20,000-25,000 kms in a span of 3-4 months of running. Any corrective action to revalidate the design change or improvement will need similar timelines in regular way to test, which is quite high in product development cycle.

The SAE J1100 based standard cargo volume index methods and predefined luggage objects are very specific to United States population. The European luggage volume calculation and standard luggage calculations are primarily based on DIN and ISO standards. Luggage volume declaration by manufacturers are based on any of these methods. The calculations are complicated and there is a possibility of declaring different values for similar luggage compartments. The major purchase decision of vehicle is based on its luggage capacity and current methods are very limited to make an intelligent decision by a customer. Market specific customer usage patterns for luggage requirements and protecting them in vehicle architecture upfront in concept stage is important to retain the market position and buying preference of customers. The usage patterns is collected from customer clinics and marketing inputs.

Vehicle safety and adherence to rules and regulation is of utmost requirement for any OEM. ECE R42 is one of the most important test criteria for a vehicle to get launched. To prove this, we shall discuss the case of Low speed impact structure construction. In this paper, we are going to demonstrate the novel design of Polymer energy absorption structure to meet the rear bumper low speed impact test and ensure proper absorption of impact energy and avoid any damage to rear lamp of the vehicle. This paper shows a perfect example of sustainability with the help of complete modular construction of the frame structure. The proposed design uses a cost-effective way of assembling the physical part by comparing with benchmarking and within the Mahindra part library. The low speed impact structure is mounted directly to BIW panels without any extra foams. These frame structure are simple in design and rigid in construction by comparing with other OEM products and within all Mahindra vehicles.

Predicting the brake performance and characteristics is a crucial task in the vehicle development activity. Performance prediction is a challenge because of the involvement of various parts in the brake assembly like booster, master cylinder, calipers, disc and drum brakes. Determination of these characteristics through vehicle level tests requires a lot of time and money. This performance prediction is achieved by theoretical calculations involving vehicle dynamics. The final output must satisfy the regulations. This project involves the creation of a standalone application using MATLAB to predict the various brake performances such as: booster characteristics, adhesion curves, deceleration and pedal effort curves, behavior of brakes during brake and booster failed conditions and braking force diagrams based on the given user inputs. Previously, MS Excel and an application developed in the TK Solver environment was used to predict the brake performance curves.

A tractor is vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds for carrying out various agriculture operations like ploughing, rotavation etc. using implement. Hydraulic system is a key feature which connects these implements with the tractor. It controls the position and draft of the implement depending upon the type of crop, farming stage, implement type and soil conditions. These variations induces extreme range of load on the hydraulic system, thus making it challenging to design these components. Bell crank assembly is one of the main components of hydraulic system which controls the draft (thus, the loads experienced by tractor) through load sensing mechanism. Often bell crank assembly failures are reported from field due to uneven soil hardness and presence of rocks. This paper studies one of such bell crank assembly failures in the field. The failure was reported after half life cycle of usage during agriculture Operation.

Globally, automotive sector is moving towards improving off-road performance, durability and safety. Need of off-road performance leads to unpredictable overload to powertrain system due to unpaved roads and abuse driving conditions. Generally, shafts and gears in the transmission system are designed to meet infinite life. But, under abuse condition, it undergo overloads in both torsional and bending modes and finally, weak part in the entire system tend to fail first. This paper represents the failure analysis of one such an incident happened in output shaft under abuse test condition. Failure mode was confirmed as torsional overload using Stereo microscope and SEM. Application stress and shear strength of the shaft was calculated and found overstressing was the cause of failure. To avoid recurrence of breakage, improvement options were identified and subjected to static torsional test to quantify the improvement level.

This article delineates the importance of infrastructure and its related aspects on sustainability of transportation on global and local context. Almost 7% of the GDP in India is spent on transportation and 6% of the CO2 emissions in the world is due to transportation. In countries like India, the road transport has significantly grown over other forms of mobility. This articles introduces different forms of transportations that exists today and the importance of sustainability in transportation sector. Sustainable transportation depends on development of infrastructure to enable smart transport solutions involving intelligent transport system, electric mobility, information management, vehicle health monitoring, advanced traffic management system and driver assistance system in a vehicle. The challenges includes existing transport operations, environmental impact and complexity of existing transport network.

In order to sustain in automobile industry, fuel economy and robustness are playing vital role in vehicle. Every gram of weight will have an impact on fuel economy, thus burning a hole in consumers pocket and contributing heavily to the carbon footprint. Composite material development plays important role in meeting the stringent self-imposed targets of the automotive manufacturers and light weighting is becoming a prime option for improving Fuel Economy. The main objective of this paper is to optimize the weight of the luggage lid floor and reduce its cost without compromising on the strength by changing the raw material and manufacturing process. This part is in trunk compartment of the vehicle. Main function of this part is to withstand the luggage load under various user loading patterns at varied temperature and while driving on different road conditions.

One of the critical challenges for transmission design is to predict the gear shift dynamics accurately and to ensure smooth gear shift quality for different driver behaviors while shifting. This calls for detailed understanding of the RWUPs. Through prototype testing, understanding the influence of different parameters is costly and time consuming. Also, the testing does not provide necessary visualization of exact physics and the identification of issues is difficult. One of such typical concerns is shift shock while shifting the gear. Sudden gear engagement or disengagement leads to impact torque in drivetrain during shifting of gears, which in turn results in winding and unwinding of powertrain due to vehicle Inertia. This induces noise and vibration that affects driver comfort. The paper presents, the methodology to frontload prediction of dynamics of gear shifting that leads to shift shock behavior.

Vehicles with manual transmission are still the most preferred choice in emerging markets like India due to their benefits in cost, simplicity and fuel economy. However, the ever-increasing vehicle population and traffic congestion demand a smooth clutch operation and a comfortable launch behaviour of any manual transmission vehicle. In the present work, the launch performance of a sports-utility vehicle (SUV) equipped with dual mass flywheel (DMF) and self-adjusting technology (SAT) clutch could be improved significantly by optimizing the clutch system. The vehicle was observed to be having a mild judder during clutch release (with 0% accelerator pedal input) in a normal 1st gear launch in flat road conditions. An extensive experimental measurement at the vehicle level could reveal the launch judder is mainly due to the 1st order excitation forces created by the geometrical inaccuracy of the internal parts of the clutch system.

The air velocity achieved at driver and passenger aim point is one of the key parameters to evaluate the automotive air-conditioning system performance. The design of duct, vent and vanes has a major contribution in the cabin air flow directivity. However, visual appearance of vent and vane receives higher priority in design because of market demand than their performance. More iterations are carried out to finalize the HVAC duct assembly until the target velocity is achieved. The objective of this study is to develop an automated process for vane articulation study along with predicting the optimized velocity at driver and passengers. The automated simulation of vane articulation study is carried out using STAR-CCM+ and SHERPA optimization algorithm which is available in HEEDS tool. The minimum and maximum vane angle are defined as parameters and face level velocity is defined as response.

Exhaust system is one of the complex automotive systems in terms of performance and strength prediction due to combination of transient mechanical and thermal loads acting on it simultaneously. Traditionally, most of automotive vehicles have exhaust systems with hot end mounted on engine and cold end mounted on chassis or BIW through hangers. A new powertrain mounted exhaust system was developed in-house. This exhaust system underwent validation and evaluation during development phase. Durability concerns were observed on exhaust system in Track test and gear shift durability test. This paper focuses on identifying the root cause of these concerns based on the failures observed during evaluation in Accelerated Durability (ADT) and gear shift durability (GSD) tests. Based on the architecture and packaging space challenges in vehicle, engine is mounted on two mounts and a roll restrictor. Muffler, which has higher inertia, is mounted at higher offset with respect to engine rolling axis.

This study on optimum magnification at which Retained austenite to be evaluated by comparing the difference in determining the retained austenite in low carbon carburizing alloy steel using the optical metallurgical micrographic method and X-ray diffraction method. The retained austenite phase will be in surface and color is white in nature also its presented in between the martensite needles. It can be distinguished as separate micro-constituents by using image analyzing software. In another method the RA measurements were carried out on the surface by PROTO iXRD Retained austenite measuring system using Cr K radiation. The (211) and (200) reflections of Martensite and (220) and (200) reflections of Austenite were made for this estimation. However, the calculated values of retained austenite by metallurgical microscope in different magnifications are not identical.

With increasing growth of vehicular population, there is an increasing demand for raw materials. This has added strain to the available resources, which is becoming more and more unsustainable. As a result, search for sustainable materials are continuously happening in our industry and there is a strong focus from everyone to incorporate more and such materials. One way of doing so, is by blending naturally available materials like fibers, with polymers. In this study, naturally available Coconut fibers have been blended successfully with Polyurethane foam, thereby improving the green footprint of the vehicle. Coconut fibers are naturally occurring fiber extracted from the husk of the coconut. Polyurethane foam is the most versatile polymeric foam used in several places of automobile for reducing the Noise, Vibration & Harshness. The composite was manufactured using reaction injection molding technique by reacting polyol with iso-cyanide.

Synchronizer design optimization is being prime need for smooth gear shifting and shifting noise. Especially in tractors, synchronizers are subjected to different kinds of loads under various field applications such as Puddling, Cultivation, Haulage, Construction equipment, etc. Also, transmission housings act as a part of chassis of the tractor and hence subjected to sever bending loads. Thus, design & evaluation of tractor transmission, meeting the customer requirement is quite complex. Current trends in product development are driven by shortening development time, reduced cost and first-time-right principle. These above requirements drive tractor manufacturers to put more efforts on delivering quality, robust and reliable transmission assembly in time. Generally the synchronizer packs were validated at sub system level in test rig and further assembled on to the tractor to validate the same in tractor level it requires more time & high cost.