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This paper discusses the methodology setup for grill opening area prediction at the early development phase of the product development lifecycle, using a commercially available 1D simulation tool- AMESIM. Representative under hood has been modeled using Grill, Condenser, Radiator, intercooler, fan, and engine components. Vehicle velocity is used as an input to derive the airflow passing through the grill and other under-hood components based on ram air coefficient, pressure drop through different components (Grill, Heat exchanger, Fan & Engine). This airflow is used to predict the top tank temperature of the radiator. Derived airflow is correlated with airflow obtained from CFD simulation. A balance has been achieved between cooling drag & fan power consumption at different grill opening areas for target top tank temperature. Top tank temperature has been predicted at two different extreme engine heat rejection operating points.

Till recently supercharging was the most accepted technique for boost solution in gasoline engines. Recent advents in turbochargers introduced turbocharging technology into gasoline engines. Turbocharging of gasoline engines has helped in powertrains with higher power density and less overall weight. Along with the advantages in performance, new challenges arise, both in terms of thermal management as well as overall acoustic performance of powertrains. The study focuses mainly on NVH aspects of turbocharging of gasoline engines. Compressor surge is a most common phenomenon in turbochargers. As the operating point on the compressor map moves closer to the surge line, the compressor starts to generate noise. The amplitude and frequency of the noise depends on the proximity of the operating point to the surge line. The severity of noise can be reduced by selecting a turbocharger with enough compressor surge margin.

In today's competitive scenario, understanding mental modal map of individual customer perception plays a major role to create the brand image of vehicle. Among them “comfortable sound” is one of the important criteria for customer satisfaction, especially in case of diesel vehicle, where in-cab sound quality plays a crucial factor. Often customer perception concerning comfort in automotive industry relies on subjective comfort evaluation method. Converting the customer perception into objective measurements and to correlate them is often tough task for NVH engineers. It is because of human sensation behavior differs from persons to person, mental map, geographical location and domain knowledge. In addition acoustic & comfort relevant aspects are often subjectively evaluated based on jury trials conducted on the prototype vehicle and class competitive benchmark vehicles to get the feel & confidence of product for different gateways.

The ever-increasing customer expectations put a lot of pressure on car manufacturers to constantly reduce the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) levels. This paper presents the holistic approach used to achieve best-in-class NVH levels in a modern high-power density 1.5 lit 4-cylinder diesel engine. In order to define the NVH targets for the engine, global benchmark engines were analysed with similar cubic capacity, power density, number of cylinders and charging system. Moreover, a benchmark diesel engine (considered as best-in-class in NVH) was measured in a semi-anechoic chamber to define the engine-level NVH targets of the new engine. The architecture selection and design of all the critical components were done giving due consideration to NVH behaviour while keeping a check on the weight and cost.

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) should innovate ways to delight customers by creating affordable products with improved drive experience and occupant comfort. Vehicle refinement is an important initiative that is often take-up by the project teams to ensure that the product meets the customer’s expectations. A few important aspects of vehicle refinement include improving the Noise Vibration Harshness (NVH), ride and handling performance pertaining to the Functional Image (FI) of the product. Optimizing the suspension design variables to meet both ride and handling performance is often challenging as improving the ride will have a deteriorating effect on handling and vice-versa. The present work involves Multi-Objective Design Optimization (MDO) of the suspension system of an automotive Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) platform considering both ride and handling requirements, simultaneously.

Range anxiety is one of the major factors to be dealt with for increasing penetration of EVs in current Automotive market. The major reasons for range anxiety for customers are sparse charging infrastructure availability, limited range of Electric vehicles and range uncertainty due to diverse real-world usage conditions. The uncertainty in real world range can be reduced by increasing the correlation between the testing condition during vehicle development and real-world customer usage condition. This paper illustrates a more accurate test methodology development to derive the real-world range in electric vehicles with experimental validation and system level analysis. A test matrix is developed considering several variables influencing vehicle range like different routes, drive modes, Regeneration levels, customer drive behavior, time of drive, locations, ambient conditions etc.

Squeak and rattle concerns account for approximately 10% of overall vehicle Things Gone Wrong (TGW) and are major quality concern for automotive OEM’s. Objectionable door noises are one of the top 10 IQS concerns under any OEM nameplate. Door trim significantly contributes to overall BSR quality perception. Door trim is mounted on door in white using small plastic clips with variable properties that can significantly influence BSR performance. In this paper, the performance of various door clips is evaluated through objective parameters like interface dynamic stiffness and system damping. The methodology involves a simple dynamic system for the evaluation of the performance of a clip design. Transmissibility is calculated from the dynamic response of a mass supported by clip. Parameters such as interface stiffness and system damping are extracted for each clip design. Variation of inner panel thickness is also considered when comparing clip performance.

Dual mass flywheel (DMF) is an excellent solution to improve the noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) characteristic of any vehicle by isolating the driveline from the engine torsional vibrations. For the same reason, DMFs are widely used in high power-density diesel and gasoline engines. However, the real-world usage conditions pose a lot of challenges to the structural robustness of the DMF. In the present work, a new methodology is developed to evaluate the robustness of a DMF fitted in a compact sports utility vehicle (SUV) with rear-wheel drive architecture. The abuse conditions (mis-gear, sudden braking, etc) in the real-world usage could lead to a sudden engine stall leading to an abnormally high angular deceleration of the driveline components. The higher rate of deceleration coupled with the higher rotational moment of inertia of the systems might end up in introducing a significantly high impact torque on the DMF.

As a car OEM, we continuously strive to set the bar for competitors with every product. Consumer travel experiences are enhanced by increasing passenger cabin silence. There is only one steering system opening in the firewall panel, which is used for allowing intermediate shaft's fitment on the pinion shaft of the steering gear. The steering grommet is the sole component that covers the firewall cut-out without disrupting steering operations, which has a substantial impact on the NVH performance of the vehicle. It is typically used in cars to eliminate engine noise and dust entering to passenger compartment. The part is assembled inside the vehicle where the steering intermediate shaft passing through BIW firewall panel. We use a bearing, plastic bush, or direct rubber interference design in the steering grommet to accommodate the rotational input the driver provides to turn the automobile.

Parametric model of a production hybrid (made up of reactive and dissipative elements) muffler for tractor engine is developed to compute the acoustic Transmission Loss (TL). The objective is to simplify complex muffler acoustic simulations without any loss of accuracy, robustness and usability so that it is accessible to all product development engineers and designers. The parametric model is a 3D Finite Element Method (FEM) based built in COMSOL model builder which is then converted into a user-friendly application (App) using COMSOL App builder. The uniqueness of the App lies in its ability to handle not only wide range of parametric variations but also variations in the physics and boundary conditions. This enables designers to explore various design options in the early design phase without the need to have deep expertise in a specific simulation tool nor in numerical acoustic modeling.

Accurate ride and handling prediction is an important requirement in today's automobile industry. To achieve the same, it is imperative to have a good estimation of damper model. Conventional methods used for modelling complex vehicle components (like bushings and dampers) are often inadequate to represent behaviour over wide frequency ranges and/or different amplitudes. This is difficult in the part of OEMs to model the physics-based model as the damper’s geometry, material and characteristics property is proprietary to part manufacturer. This is also usually difficult to obtain as a typical data acquisition exercise takes lots of time, cost, and effort. This paper aims to address this problem by predicting the damper force accurately at different velocity/ frequency and amplitude of measured data using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN).

Manual transmission (MT) is still the most preferred solution for emerging markets due to the lower cost of ownership and maintenance coupled with a higher transmission efficiency. In this regard, continuous improvement of the transmission shift quality is quite essential to meet the growing customer expectations. In the present work, a detailed evaluation of the gear-shift impulse (experienced at the gear-shift knob) is conducted between two different architectures of a manual, high-torque (450 Nm input torque) inline transmission meant for a sports utility vehicle (SUV). The conventional manual inline transmission architecture comprises a common gear pair at the input of the transmission. While this input reduction architecture is the most widely used architecture, having the common gear pair at the output of the transmission is also another option. The synchronizers of the manual transmission need to match the speed of the rotating components just before the gear-shifting event.

NVH is becoming one of the major factor for customer selection of vehicle along with parameters like fuel economy and drivability. One of the major NVH challenges is to have a vehicle with aggressive drivability and at the same time with acceptable noise and vibration levels. This paper focuses on the compact utility vehicle where the howling noise is occurring at higher rpm of the engine. The vehicle is powered by three cylinder turbocharged diesel engine. The noise levels were higher above 2500 rpm due to the presence of structural resonance. Operational deflection shapes (ODS) and Transfer path analysis (TPA) analysis was done on entire vehicle and powertrain to find out the major reason for howling noise at higher engine rpm. It is observed that the major contribution for noise at higher rpm is due to modal coupling between powertrain, half shaft and vehicle sub frame.

This paper focuses on reducing abnormal noise originating from suspension when driving on rough road at the speed of 20 kmph. The test vehicle is a front wheel driven monocoque SUV powered by four cylinder engine. Cabin noise levels are higher between 100 to 800 Hz when driven on rough road at 20 kmph. Vibration levels are measured on front and rear suspension components, front and rear subframe, subframe connections on body to identify the noise source locations. Since the noise levels are dominant only in certain rough patches at very narrow band of time, wavelet analysis is used for identification of frequency at which the problem exist. Based on wavelet analysis, it is identified that the vibration levels are dominant on front lower control arm (LCA). The dynamic stiffness of LCA bushes is reduced by ~ 40% to improve the isolator performance which reduced the noise levels by ~ 9 dB (A) at the problematic frequency band.

The customer demand for all wheel drive (AWD) vehicles is increasing over the period of time which also requires NVH performance on par with front wheel drive vehicles. AWD vehicles are equipped with power transfer unit, propeller shaft and independent rear differential assembly to achieve their functional requirement. The additional drive train components in AWD vehicles may amplify torsional fluctuations in the drive line. Hence achieving the NVH performance of AWD vehicles on par with FWD vehicles without any major change in the existing design is a major challenge. In this work, an AWD vehicle with severe body vibration and booming noise is studied. The operational measurements are taken throughout the drive train on all sub-systems from engine to the rear part of the body in the problematic operating condition. An operational deflection shape analysis is conducted to visualize the vibration behavior of the drive train.

Development of Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) and Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) is gaining traction across all geographies to help meet increasing fuel economy regulations and as a pathway to offset concerns due to climate change. But HEVs and EVs have so far been a nascent market for India. These technologies have primarily shifted towards Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) for energy storage due to its high energy and power densities. In order to make actual business sense of these technologies, of which, battery is a major cost driver, it is necessary for these batteries to provide similar performance and life expectancy across the operating boundary of the vehicles, as well as provide the requirements at a competitive cost. In other words, the LIBs have to sustain the normal life cycle requirements and withstand wide range of storage temperatures that the conventional gasoline/diesel vehicles have been good at and still ensure good life.

Connected vehicle services have come a long way from the early days of telematics, both in terms of breadth of the class of vehicles, and in terms of richness or complexity of the data being handled for Enhancing Customer Experience. The Connectivity Control unit (CCU) is a gateway device for the vehicle to the outside world. While it enables transmission of vehicle data along with the location information. CCU is currently validated in the vehicle to check functionality. It has cost, time drawbacks and prevents effective testing of many scenarios. Bench level validation will not be able to complete functionality validation. There is subset of validation tools or semi-automated solutions are available in the market, but they are not fully functional, and critically cannot perform end to end validation. Automated Test setup for CCU in lab simulating the entire field data of the vehicle with modifiable characteristics.

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.

One of the primary excitation sources in a passenger car comes from the powertrain [1]. Refinement of powertrain induced noise is the most critical tasks during a vehicle refinement. Due to ever increasing demand for reduced design and development cycle, most critical decisions have to be made at the concept stage. Powertrain radiated noise is one of the most important performance factor that must be evaluated during the concept stage. Solution time for calculating the radiated noise using the existing acoustic solvers is very high and requires very expensive resources like software and hardware. Arriving the optimal design with conventional method is very tedious job. A new method has been adopted for identifying the critical areas and coming up with the optimal design modifications within a short span of time. Powertrain radiated noise has been calculated with the help of acoustic solver.

Reducing the vibrations in the powertrain is one of the prime necessities in today's automobiles from NVH and strength perspectives. The necessity of 4×4 powertrain is increasing for better control on normal road and off-road vehicles. This leads to bulky powertrains. The vehicle speeds are increasing, that requires engines to run at higher speeds. Also to save on material costs and improve on fuel economy there is a need for optimizing the mass of the engine/vehicle. The reduced stiffness and higher speeds lead to increased noise and vibrations. One more challenge a powertrain design engineer has to face during design of its transmission housings is the bending / torsional mode vibrations of powertrain assembly. This aggravates other concerns such as shift lever vibrations, shift lever rattle, rise in in-cab noise, generation of boom noise at certain speeds, etc. Hence, reducing vibrations becomes an important and difficult aspect in design of an automobile.