Browse Topic: Homologation
Homologation is an important process in vehicle development and aerodynamics a main data contributor. The process is heavily interconnected: Production planning defines the available assemblies. Construction defines their parts and features. Sales defines the assemblies offered in different markets, where Legislation defines the rules applicable to homologation. Control engineers define the behavior of active, aerodynamically relevant components. Wind tunnels are the main test tool for the homologation, accompanied by surface-area measurement systems. Mechanics support these test operations. The prototype management provides test vehicles, while parts come from various production and prototyping sources and are stored and commissioned by logistics. Several phases of this complex process share the same context: Production timelines for assemblies and parts for each chassis-engine package define which drag coefficients or drag coefficient contributions shall be determined. Absolute and
When designing new vehicles, the legal requirements of the countries in which the vehicles are homologated must be observed and implemented. The manufacturers try to consider the legal framework of the UN-ECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), CCC (China Compulsory Certification) and FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) 108 in the same vehicle to keep the variance low. For the appearance of the vehicle, the position of the light modules in the front of the vehicle is important. In addition to the surface requirements of lighting functions, the positions of the low beam (LB), high beam (HB) and the position of daytime running lights (DRL) are also regulated. When it comes to these mounting positions, the legislation between the US and the EU differs quite significantly. The UN-ECE legal framework does not describe the distance between the left and right Adaptive Front Lighting System with a certain value, but only requires the distance to the outer edge of the
Fuel economy is one of the main drivers of the automotive industry. This subject is becoming more and more important showing a clear upraising relevance tendency. The automotive community is researching and developing many solutions and trending technologies to improve the internal combustion engine, realizing its existence is under risk due to strong greenhouse gas impact. Some innovative technologies focus on the internal combustion engines replacement by other energy conversion systems. Other new technologies improve internal combustion engines efficiency but, in most of the cases, impacts on its costs and consequently on its viability, especially considering the entry level passenger cars. In these applications, the cost impact is hardly acceptable by the customers and this market represents a considerable part of the global automotive industry. Any opportunity to improve the vehicle efficiency with minimum cost is welcome. This paper intends to assess the development and
In the perspective of fuel saving and emissions reduction, engine oil thermal management has not yet received the attention it deserves. Lubricating oil, in fact, should be the focus of a specific warmup action: the expected benefits is on friction reduction – mechanical efficiency improvement – but also on a positive interaction with the cooling fluid thermal dynamics. The lower thermal capacity of the circulating oil (with respect to the cooling fluid) and the instantaneous reduction of the viscosity due to temperature increase produces a faster engine overall efficiency benefit: this invites to focus specific actions on its thermal management in the direction of speeding up the temperature rise during a cold engine starting. Being the mechanical engine efficiency strongly influenced by the friction losses and considering the important benefits on oil viscosity due to a temperature increase, important beneficial effects should be observed on fuel consumption: unfortunately, the big
To assess the fuel consumption of vehicles, three sets of input data are required; drive cycles, vehicle parameters, and environmental conditions. As the first part of a series of studies on real-world fuel consumption, this study focuses on the drive cycles. In principle, drive cycles should represent real-world usage. Some of them aim at a specific usage such as a city driving condition or an aggressive driving style. However, the definition of city or aggressive driving is very subjective and difficult to quantitatively correlate with the real-world usage. This study proposes a methodology to quantify the speed and dynamics of drive cycles, or vehicle speed traces in general, against the real-world usage. After reviewing parameter sets found in other studies, relative cubic speed (RCS) and positive kinetic energy (PKE) are selected to represent the speed and dynamics through energy flow balance at the wheels. The authors suggest a normalised 2-dimensional coordinate space
The motor vehicles are the main source of atmospheric pollution, especially carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides (NOx). To reduce these emissions for environmentally acceptable levels, Europe and the United States have developed control programs, where are set emissions limits for new vehicles, which are gradually reduced over time and the compliance must be done through standardized tests in laboratories. However, Europe is facing a problem: NOx level in the cities is not being reduced in the same proportion of the homologation limits, due to two factors: the poor representativeness of the test procedures in comparison of the “real world” and the use of engine management software that produces low pollutants just in laboratory tests. Several studies about real world emissions have pointed to vehicles, approved in the laboratory, emitting in the streets about 7 up to 40 times more NOx than the homologation limit. To fix this problem, since September/2017 Europe will add to
A 4 wheeled vehicle with X-split brake configuration, in hydraulic circuit failed condition will have a behavior of induced sway due to braking force variation in the front and rear diagonally. With increasing vehicle speed, engine power & customer expectations, the situation becomes more critical and challenging in designing a brake system which caters in meeting the homologation requirement at an expense of vehicle sway within controllable limits of driver / customer. This paper proposes a novel approach & methodology to overcome the above situation by predicting the effect of brake force distribution variation on the vehicle swaying behavior during circuit failed braking condition. This study will quantify vehicle sway, caused due to imbalance in brake force distribution during a circuit failed braking event on X Split configuration vehicles. This study will also aid in forecasting the vehicle sway capacity of a given vehicle and do necessary corrective design amendments to reduce
Increasing global efficiency of direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine is nowadays one of the main concerns in automotive research. A conventional way to reduce DISI engine fuel consumption is through downsizing. This approach is well suited to the current homologation cycle as NEDC, but has the drawback to induce over-consumptions in customer real driving usage. Moreover, the driving cycles dedicated to EURO 6d and future regulations will evolve towards higher load operating conditions with higher particulate emissions. Therefore, efficiency of current DISI has to be strongly increased, for homologation cycle and real driving conditions. This implies to deeply understand and improve injection, mixing and flame propagation processes. This work proposes an alternative way to improve the thermodynamic efficiency of the combustion system, by coupling an increase of Compression Ratio (CR) with high levels of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and the setup of Miller/Atkinson cycle at
Adaptive driving beam (ADB), which was first homologated in the ECE world (ECE 123) in 2012 has changed the automotive Front Lighting philosophy completely. Whereas we currently live with separate low beam and high beam features, also used in a combined way, we will have in the future a camera driven light distribution, which is a kind of modified high beam light pattern. ADB is a camera based lighting system, which enables the driver to achieve at night nearly high beam visibility without glaring oncoming or proceeding vehicles and road users. Once the presence of other vehicles is detected the headlamps change the light pattern and block the light where the oncoming or proceeding vehicles are located. The typical low beam light distribution with given and specified cutoff line will only be used in small speed areas. In US this development was well recognized and NHTSA is preparing a way to enable and approve the ADB systems with specific boundary conditions also for the US market
Due to the constant environmental preoccupation, application of increasingly sophisticated technologies for control of motor vehicle pollutants and necessity of monitoring of such systems, the Embedded Emissions Monitoring System (OBD) was implemented with the primary function of ensuring that the pollutant emissions levels stay within the homologation limits during the whole vehicle useful life. For this reason electronic systems (such as sensors, actuators and model-based functions) are increasingly being used for powertrain control, thereby increasing the complexity of such systems. As a consequence the software fine tuning is also becoming more complex leading to increase of costs during the development phase. In this paper is presented theoretical and practical analysis of the OBD system for Otto (L6) and Diesel (L6 / P7) systems in order to evaluate the differences and identify possible synergies between both applications
Since 2012, adaptive driving beam (ADB) was homologated first in the ECE world (ECE 123). The idea behind is a camera based lighting system, which enables the driver to achieve at night nearly high beam visibility without glaring oncoming or proceeding vehicles and road users. Once the presence of other vehicles is detected the headlamps change the light pattern and block the light where the oncoming or proceeding vehicles are located. Light sources are typically High Intensity Discharge (HID) bulbs, but today also first LED applications are visible. For SAE, the definition of the parameters and the requested regulation changes to allow such systems are in progress. The paper reports about an extensive study executed in Germany at TU Darmstadt to investigate not only the improvement in visibility for the driver with such systems, but also evaluate the disability and discomfort glare for other road users. The results are demonstrating clearly, that the existing ADB systems do not cause
In today's automotive climate, the tendency of an increasing number of vehicle model variants offered is coming to a head with the growing demands for safer vehicles. New legislation now ensures that the safety improvement by the fitment of stability control systems is certified for each new vehicle. Beginning year 2012, all new cars to be sold in the European Union have to be equipped with ESC, and as means to test performance, a new supplement to ECE R13 requires that the Sine-with-Dwell test be passed. As a result, OEMs have to handle the task of demonstrating that all their vehicles meet homologation requirements. With such a range of variants possible in each model, this can lead to an enormous quantity of testing. However, for the first time, ECE R13 allows homologation to be undertaken by test-supported simulation, and it is now possible to transfer more and more of this work into CAE. This paper describes the results of a project executed at General Motors Europe (GME) in
Industry standards and practices define a number of mathematical and physical methods to estimate the cargo carrying volume capacity of a vehicle. While some have roots dating back decades, others try to assess the utility of the space for cargo by subjective measurements. Each these methods have their own inherent merits and deficiencies. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the differences in calculated cargo volume amongst the following practices: Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) J1100[1] International Organization for Standardization (ISO 3832)[2], Global Car manufacturer's Information Exchange group (GCIE)[3], Consumer Reports[4]. This paper provides a method and associated rationale for constructing a new cargo volume calculation practice that attempts to harmonize these procedures into a more contiguous practice. This homologation will benefit publishing industry, vehicle manufacturers and customers alike. The publishing industry would have a common cargo reporting
Since the late 19th century until recently several electric vehicles have been designed, manufactured and used throughout the world. Some were just prototypes, others were concept cars, others were just special purpose vehicles and lately, a considerable number of general purpose cars has been produced and commercialized. Since the mid nineties the transportation sector emissions are being increasingly regulated and the dependency on oil and its price fluctuations originated an increasing interest on electric vehicles (EV). A wide research was made on existing electric/hybrid vehicle models. Some of these vehicles were just in the design phase, but most reached the prototype or full market production. They were divided into several types, such as NEVs, prototypes, concept cars, and full homologated production cars. For each type of vehicle model a technical historic analysis was made. Data related to the vehicle configuration as well as the embedded systems were collected and compared
The paper addresses the problem of toxic emission from non-road vehicles. The paper presents the results of the investigations and analyses related to the engine operating conditions of a selected group of non-road vehicles. The presented tests have been carried out on a large groups of vehicles - several from each representative group. This was chiefly on-site construction machinery (dump tracks, excavators, bulldozers) used in the construction of the motorway and as an auxiliary equipment in an open-cast mine. An analysis has been performed based on which a range of the most frequently used loads and engine speeds was determined. The obtained time density characteristics (distribution of speeds and loads in time) of the engines was compared to the measuring points of the toxic emission homologation cycle. On this basis conclusions have been drawn in relation to the correlation between the measuring points of the cycle and the most frequently used areas of loads and speeds of
This study aims to characterize real world bus driving behavior from data obtained in experimental campaigns using instrumented buses. An integrated statistical method to determine bus driving behavior, based on analysis of time series of bus speed and GPS location data, is illustrated in this paper. Kinematic features of bus operating conditions are characterized by multivariate analysis of trip speed time series. Each trip is analyzed within a multi-level hierarchical structure: sequence, sub-cycle, cycle (part of trip between two successive bus stops). Finally, a preliminary application of the proposed method is shown, based on data obtained with buses of different size and homologation class in Naples and Palermo. Reference driving cycles were built, for one line in both cities, taking the most statistically representative cycles of each line with regard to different traffic and road situations. The ensuing results are useful in evaluating emissions measured in on-road testing at
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