Estimation of Secondary Mass Changes in Vehicle Design

It is well known that an unplanned component mass increase during vehicle design creates a ripple effect of changes throughout the vehicle subsystems, which require resizing for the additional mass. This in turn, increases overall vehicle mass. And the opposite is true in vehicle mass reduction where subsystem resizing is necessary to account for an initial mass reduction enabled, for example, by a new technology. These secondary mass changes can be significant and must be considered in the mass budgeting process due to their importance to fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emission assessments. Secondary mass reduction may be modeled using subsystem mass influence coefficients-the incremental change in subsystem mass for a unit change in gross vehicle mass. This paper focuses on means to estimate influence coefficients using two methods: Analytical and Regression.