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In the automotive industry, silicon adhesive has become increasingly popular due to its benefits in ease of assembly and cost savings associated with material and manufacturing processes. To meet the imperative of minimizing both time and expenses during the project's development phase, it becomes essential to select the appropriate gasket material and an optimal flange design at the outset of the design process. In order to achieve stringent emission standards such as Real Driving Emission (RDE) and Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) norms, a better sealing performance is an essential parameter. Various types of liquid gaskets such as silicon rubber based Room Temperature Vulcanizing (RTV) sealants and thermoset plastic based Anaerobic sealants are widely used in an Internal Combustion engine. They are commonly used for the components such as oil sump, bedplate, and gearbox housings, etc.

The stress concentration at welded joints and small crack propagation from some pre-existing discontinuities at notched regions control the fatigue life of typical welded structures. There are numerous FEM stress-based weld fatigue assessment approaches available commercially which unify FEM stresses with various fatigue software codes embedded with international weld standards. However, FEM stress-based approaches predict extensively conservative results. Considerable efforts & subjective decision making is required to arrive at desired level of weld life correlation with physical test results, in terms of weld life and failure location. This is majorly because of inconsistency & inaccuracy in capturing the hot spot stress results due to stress singularities occurring at the notched regions owing to the mesh sensitivity, modeling complexity.

In automotive design and development, there are different stages for product design. In this fast changing scenario product design, digital verification of design (CAE), physical validation of the product and launching of the same in short time is important in product development life cycle of any new generation vehicle. This paper proposes a new approach towards development of a green-field platform for commercial vehicles by improving reliability of CAE and thereby reducing the need for prototype testing and hence shortening development cycle and costs - we call it “Hybrid Mule”. This Hybrid Mule has complete design intent under-body and engine-house while upper-body is made of simple representative tubular space frame. FRP skin panels are attached to this space frame to create a safe environment for test-driver. FRP skin also provides early feel of styling in running condition and evaluates basic ergonomics and visibility.

In automobiles, there are various multiphysics (specifically fluid structure interaction) events taking place which are very important from vehicle operations. Examples are - oil splashing in engine, water spraying on the windscreen, fuel sloshing in a tank etc. The simulation of such events becomes important in the design stage in order to study their proper functioning before the prototypes are made. This paper enlightens the systematic procedures developed for the simulation of such events using coupled Euler-Lagrangian method available in commercial finite element explicit codes. These simulations are very time consuming because of very small time steps and very large cycle time. To overcome this problem an attempt is made to use rigid bodies and a low bulk modulus fluid to speed up the simulation exponentially. These quick simulations can be used for early design iterations and final designs can be revalidated with flexible bodies and correct bulk modulus.

Spot weld connections are used extensively in the automotive industry to join panels of automotive structures. Spot weld connections play a very vital role in the overall structural rigidity and integrity of the Body in White. The spot weld connections and layout have direct impact on functionability of automotive structure and capital investment for robots, guns and operators. There is continuous pressure on automotive engineers to reduce the number of spot weld connections in a structure without compromising on the structural performance across various disciplines such as crash, NVH & durability. Hence the need is felt to develop a generic and systematic CAE simulation procedure which will guide the designer towards arriving at an optimum design, with minimum number of spot weld connections, which meet all the performance requirements of the structure.