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Previous studies have investigated the impacts of biofuel usage on the performance, drivability and durability of modern diesel engines and exhaust after-treatment systems including test work with different types, concentrations and mixtures of bio fuel components. During this earlier work vehicle fuel filter blocking issues were encountered during a field trial using various types of EN 14214 compliant Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) blended into EN 590 diesel. This paper summarises a subsequent literature review that was carried out looking into potential causes of this filter blocking and further work that was then carried out to expand on the findings. From this, a laboratory study was carried out to assess the increase in fuel filter blocking tendency (FBT) when various FAMEs from mixed sources were blended into EN 590 diesel at different concentrations, including levels above those currently allowed in the European market.

Reductions of hardware costs as well as implementations of new innovative functions are the main drivers of today's automotive electronics. Indeed more and more resources are spent on adapting existing solutions to different environments. At the same time, due to the increasing number of networked components, a level of complexity has been reached which is difficult to handle using traditional development processes. The automotive industry addresses this problem through a paradigm shift from a hardware-, component-driven to a requirement- and function-driven development process, and a stringent standardization of infrastructure elements. One central standardization initiative is the AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR). AUTOSAR was founded in 2003 by major OEMs and Tier1 suppliers and now includes a large number of automotive, electronics, semiconductor, hard- and software companies.

Over the past decades, the automotive industry has made significant efforts to improve engine fuel economy by reducing mechanical friction. Reducing friction under cold conditions is becoming more important in hybrid vehicle (HV) and plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHV) systems due to the lower oil temperatures of these systems, which results in higher friction loss. To help resolve this issue, a new internal gear fully variable discharge oil pump (F-VDOP) was developed. This new oil pump can control the oil pressure freely over a temperature range from -10°C to hot conditions. At 20°C, this pump lowers the minimum main gallery pressure to 100 kPa, thereby achieving a friction reduction effect of 1.4 Nm. The developed oil pump achieves a pressure response time constant of 0.17 seconds when changing the oil pressure from 120 kPa to 200 kPa at a temperature of 20°C and an engine speed of 1,600 rpm.

This paper describes the development of dummy FE models to be used for side impact simulations. The precise geometries of the ES-2re dummy and the SID-IIs dummy were measured at a pitch of 1.0 mm using X-ray CT scan. The material properties and the mechanical responses of the components were measured in static and dynamic tests and were used for the model validation. The models were further validated to US-NCAP side impact requirements. Good correlation was seen for both response time history, and to peak deformation values. It is shown that modeling the precise dummy internal structure in addition to the external geometry and applying accurate material properties enabled simulation of deformation kinematics and load transfer inside the dummies. As a result, it was possible to accurately simulate the injury value time histories in an actual test, and understand the mechanisms causing changes to the loading.

Nitric Oxide (NO) can significantly influence the autoignition reactivity and this can affect knock limits in conventional stoichiometric SI engines. Previous studies also revealed that the role of NO changes with fuel type. Fuels with high RON (Research Octane Number) and high Octane Sensitivity (S = RON - MON (Motor Octane Number)) exhibited monotonically retarding knock-limited combustion phasing (KL-CA50) with increasing NO. In contrast, for a high-RON, low-S fuel, the addition of NO initially resulted in a strongly retarded KL-CA50 but beyond the certain amount of NO, KL-CA50 advanced again. The current study focuses on same high-RON, low-S Alkylate fuel to better understand the mechanisms responsible for the reversal in the effect of NO on KL-CA50 beyond a certain amount of NO.

There exist many environmental and earth resource problems to be solved for the 21st century. Hybridization of both internal combustion powertrains and fuel cell powertrains holds great promise for next generation vehicles. This paper describes the lessons learned during design, development, production and marketing of nearly 700,000 hybrid vehicles to date. We review the evolution of major components with a focus on reducing cost, mass and volume while increasing power and efficiency. We also describe the future prospects for hybrid vehicles.

The growing functionality and complexity of recent vehicle electronic systems have made inter-device communication (on-board LAN) technology vital to vehicle design. By field of application, the LAN (Local Area Network) systems currently in use are LIN (Local Interconnect Network) used for body systems, CAN (Controller Area Network) used for control systems, and MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport ) used for multimedia and camera systems, and work to standardize the next-generation communication technology for each of those fields is underway. This paper provides a technical overview of the CXPI (Clock Extension Peripheral Interface) communication protocol, which satisfies the body system requirements (rapid response, system extensibility, high reliability, and low cost). It also presents the progress made on standardization at SAE and other organizations.

In an effort to reduce mass, future automotive bodies will feature lower gage steel or lighter weight materials such as aluminum. An unfortunate side effect of lighter weight bodies is a reduction in sound transmission loss (TL). For barrier based systems, as the total system mass (including the sheet metal, decoupler, and barrier) goes down the transmission loss is reduced. If the reduced surface density from the sheet metal is added to the barrier, however, performance can be restored (though, of course, this eliminates the mass savings). In fact, if all of the saved mass from the sheet metal is added to the barrier, the TL performance may be improved over the original system. This is because the optimum performance for a barrier based system is achieved when the sheet metal and the barrier have equal surface densities. That is not the case for standard steel constructions where the surface density of the sheet metal is higher than the barrier.

In recent vehicles, E/E architecture is defined and used as a platform to accommodate various electronics features for better development efficiency, lower cost and higher quality. As electronics features increase and integrated control systems make vehicle electronics more complex, good electronics platforms are vital for today's and future vehicle development. This paper first describes the evolution of vehicle electronics and its recent trend and then addresses the challenges facing vehicle electronics: ✓ More integrated control systems ✓ More software ✓ More networks ✓ Shorter time to market Finally, why JasPar1), Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture, was founded and how it is organized will be described including the working group activities on FlexRay implementation.

High fuel efficiency and low emission technologies, such as Direct Injection (DI) gasoline and diesel engines and hybrid powertrains, have been developed to resolve environmental and energy resource issues. The hybrid powertrain system has achieved superior power performance as well as higher system efficiency and is expected to be a core powertrain technology because it is compatible with various power sources including fuel cells. It becomes important to control complicated hybrid systems that consist of not only a powertrain but also vehicle systems such as regenerative braking. Model-based control and calibration enables both control strategy optimization and control system development efficiency improvement.