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Increasingly stringent environmental regulations requiring lower CO2 emissions and higher fuel economy have made it essential to develop vehicles with superior fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions. At the same time, there is growing demand for even more powerful and quieter vehicles. To help satisfy these requirements, Toyota Motor Corporation has developed a new 8-speed automatic transmission for front wheel drive vehicles, incorporating its first compact torque converter with a multiple disk lock-up mechanism. This newly developed compact torque converter with a multiple disk lock-up mechanism was designed under the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA) development concept to achieve an excellent balance between higher efficiency through the commonization of components and stronger product appeal through installation on a whole family of transmissions. This compact torque converter is compatible with a variety of engines from inline 4-cylinder to V6 configurations.

It has been past over 10 years since the slip-controlled clutch has adopted to torque converters as improvement technology of fuel consumption. In the recent trend, the updated demand is use of expanded slipping control for further improvement of the transmission efficiency. However, there are the cases of vibration issues in slip-controlled torque converter clutches. This issue is called shudder as typical problem of vehicle vibration. In design of torque converter, it is known as the importance to manage μ -V property preventing from shudder vibration. However, it was difficult to predict μ -V property on the actual system, because of its complex interface phenomena are caused by various changeable factors include physical and chemical. Therefore, if prototype design was never satisfied anti- shudder properties, we need to change design and lost much time to redesign it.