A tailored model for the assessment of environmental benefits achievable by light-weighting design solutions in the automotive field is presented. The model is based on the Fuel Reduction Value (FRV) coefficient which expresses the Fuel Consumption (FC) saving involved by a 100 kg vehicle mass reduction. The work is composed by two main sections: simulation and environmental modelling. Simulati...

There has been a continuous increase in automotive electric power usage. Future projections show no sign of it decreasing. Therefore, the automotive industry has a need to either improve the current 12 Volt automotive electrical system or move to a higher voltage vehicle electric system. Both of these choices are likely to increase cost of the system. Performance improvements will be needed to ...

The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of emerging technological paths in the automotive industry. Worldwide patent data from the years 1990–2010 was collected and utilised to define the technological life cycles of the electric and fuel cell vehicle technologies. The novelty of our study is practicing the patent analysis approach using text mining techniques to collect patents acc...

Control of automotive exhaust emission has become an important research area to meet the more stringent automotive emission regulations. Beside the modification on internal combustion engine, control engineering is seen as another approach to improve and meet these requirements. This paper focuses on the design and development of a control system to reduce the harmful waste of automotive exhaus...

We present an industrial case study in automotive control of significant complexity: the new common rail fuel injection system for Diesel engines, currently under production by Magneti Marelli Powertrain. In this system, a flow–rate valve, introduced before the High Pressure (HP) pump, regulates the fuel flow that supplies the common rail according to the engine operating point. The standard ap...

Objectives • Develop realistic and internally consistent detailed designs for automotive gasoline fuel processor/ proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell systems and direct hydrogen PEM fuel cell systems by using current-year technology. • Apply Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) design and costing techniques to compare system designs at low, medium, and high annual production rates. •...

The present paper explores the impact of an on-board hydrogen harvesting system (fuel reformer) on the overall efficiency of a fuel-cell powered vehicle. Various methods of hydrogen production for automotive applications have been discussed first. As the hydrogen production is one of the major challenges for application of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, especially in vehicular indus...

The knowledge of the actual engaged gear is essential to achieve highquality control of an automotive power train. In cars equipped with manual gear shift, this information is not directly available. A hybrid observer for on–line identification of the actual engaged gear is proposed. Two hybrid models of an automotive driveline, a detailed one for verification and a reduced-order one for synthe...

Analysis and optimization of simulation-generated data have myriads of scientific and industrial applications. Fuel consumption and emissions over the entire drive cycle of a large fleet of vehicles is an example of such an application and the focus of this study. Temporal variation of fuel consumption and emissions in an automotive engine are functions of over twenty variables. Determining rel...