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Modern advances in the technical developments of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have elevated autonomous vehicle (AV) operations to a new height. Vehicles equipped with sensor based ADAS have been positively contributing to safer roads. As the automotive industry strives for SAE Level 5 full driving autonomy, challenges inevitably arise to ensure ADAS performance and reliability in all driving scenarios, especially in adverse weather conditions, during which ADAS sensors such as optical cameras and LiDARs suffer performance degradation, leading to inaccuracy and inability to provide crucial environmental information for object detection. Currently, the difficulty to simulate realistic and dynamic adverse weather scenarios experienced by vehicles in a controlled environment becomes one of the challenges that hinders further ADAS development.

The advancement of Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) technologies offers tremendous benefits. ADAS features such as emergency braking, blind-spot monitoring, lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, etc., are promising to lower on-road accident rates and severity. With a common goal for the automotive industry to achieve higher levels of autonomy, maintaining ADAS sensor performance and reliability is the core to ensuring adequate ADAS functionality. Currently, the challenges faced by ADAS sensors include performance degradation in adverse weather conditions and a lack of controlled evaluation methods. Outdoor testing encounters repeatability issues, while indoor testing with a stationary vehicle lacks realistic conditions. This study proposes a hybrid method to combine the advantages of both outdoor and indoor testing approaches in a Drive-thru Climate Tunnel (DCT).

Wind tunnels with integrated aerodynamic and thermodynamic testing with yaw capabilities are not common. In this study however, an integrated aerodynamic and thermodynamic testing system with yaw capabilities is developed and applied in the climatic wind tunnel at the University of Ontario-Institute of Technology (UOIT). This was done by installing an incremental force measuring system (FMS) on the large turntable that features a chassis dynamometer. The testing system was utilized to implement an integrated aero-thermal test on a full-scale race car. An efficient testing protocol was developed to streamline the integrated testing process. The FMS was used to enhance the test car’s stability, cornering speed, and fuel efficiency by using aerodynamic devices. These objectives were achieved by installing a high rear wing to increase the rear downforce, a modified front splitter extension to produce a front downforce gain, and front canards to contribute to drag reduction.

Underbody vehicle flows are poorly understood given the comparatively small field of research to draw upon; even more so in the case of crosswinds. With the advent of electric and hybrid electric vehicles and their increased cooling demands, there is a need for a link between the aerodynamic flow field and the thermodynamic response. Thus underbody research considering a yawing vehicle was conducted on a Chevrolet Aveo5 hatchback. The vehicle was outfitted with a heat source to provide a baseline analysis along thermocouples, pressure probes and flow visualization tufts. The climatic wind tunnel at the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology's Automotive Centre of Excellence provided video data of the tufts and thermal imaging data of the heat source.

The University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) is the home of the General Motors of Canada Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE), a university owned and operated facility that is funded by the university and the provincial and federal governments of Canada. As such, ACE is available to all automotive manufacturers (OEM's), Tier 1 suppliers, university researchers, or any other industry requiring the need for independent research and development test capability. A large climatic wind tunnel is the signature feature of ACE, which also includes climatic chambers (one of which is a high feature chamber), a climatic 4-post shaker test cell and a hemi-anechoic chamber equipped with a multi-axis shaker table. Some key design features of the climatic wind tunnel include a variable nozzle geometry (from 7 m₂ to 13 m₂), a chassis dynamometer inserted in an 11.7 meter turntable, a boundary layer control system and circuit acoustic treatment for low background noise levels.