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A hydraulic-assisted power steering system on a vehicle has a steering pump which is directly driven from the engine continuously. In real world, the assistance from the steering pump is useful only while maneuvering. During a typical highway drive, assistance from this power steering pump remains unused for majority (76%) of the time; although the continuously rotating power steering pump keeps consuming energy from the engine. An electronic controller has been provided for the electro-magnetic pairing device of the power steering pump in order to provide assistance for steering based on driver demand only. The electromagnetic pairing device integrated on the steering pump can be made to engage/disengage based on the driver demand through the electronic controller.

S.A.V.E. (SOLAR-ASSISTED VEHICLE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM) is a microcontroller-based closed loop system designed to optimize the duty cycle of alternator in conventional vehicle electrical system. This has been done by integrating a SOLAR PANEL on the rooftop of a popular hatchback. The SOLAR PANEL supplies continuous power to battery for charging thereby reducing alternator duty cycle. Consequently, in order to optimize/control alternator functioning based on demand, a microcontroller has been incorporated. S.A.V.E. consists of a microcontroller which senses the instantaneous electrical load (in terms of current & voltage drawn) from battery. The controller using the intelligent algorithm keeps on checking this real-time consumption with the threshold values & decides when to activate/deactivate alternator. Thus with this controller, a) reduction in actual CO₂ emission & consequent, and b) 6% improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency has been achieved.

Drive cycles are an important tool to a vehicle development team. In order to achieve good design tunes, an accurate drive cycle is important. It is essential that errors occurring out of drive cycles be contained within the level of data scatter obtained from the use of a drive cycle. For example: fuel consumption. Only an accurate drive cycle will be able to highlight the small differences associated with minor changes to vehicle specification that affect fuel consumption. A methodology has been established to derive a drive cycle representative of real life usage. This has been done using a GPS based system. Recombination methodology was used to recreate a synthetic drive cycle from actual driving conditions. Correlation was determined using synthesis of sequences as observed in actual data. Results show that the drive cycle data matches very well with actual values of fuel consumption under real life conditions.