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The designers of heavy-duty off-road vehicles have been facing increasing pressure to reduce the cost and time required for assembly and maintenance. While the requirement to reduce assembly times is mainly an OEM driven objective, the requirement to reduce maintenance times is frequently driven by the customer. The design team is usually faced with the challenge of balancing functional requirements with what are often viewed as wish lists of easy assembly and maintenance, under the pressure of ever shorter development cycles. As a result, vehicle maintainability and ease of assembly are often overlooked early in the design cycle which can lead to less than desired results. This paper explores the design objectives and resultant solutions which were developed in the creation of the power-pack of a heavy-duty off-road vehicle.

An important segment of power system design often left to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is the engine exhaust system. The requirement of exhaust after treatment has increased the importance of exhaust systems to be impermeable and still retain their physical flexibility. To achieve the necessary flexibility, OEMs will often choose to incorporate an available expansion joint(s) into the exhaust system. Often, conversations with expansion joint suppliers result in the OEM having to supply vital information about the application or a vehicle to record acceleration and vibration information. Unfortunately, the cost of building low volume vehicles does not always afford the OEM with enough resources to develop a custom expansion joint for the exhaust system. As a result, it is important to understand what the proper inputs are, make a sound engineering judgment as to what the worst case magnitude may be and provide that information to different suppliers.