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Vapor management system is critical to manage fuel tank capacity, evaporative emissions and pressure control for hybrid applications. Due to stringent emission norms and other regulations there has been lot of advancements in design and application of vapor control valves that are used in automotive fuel tanks. Continuous exposure of these valves to fuel vapor or fuel in some instances led to swelling of assemblies and poses serious threat to product functionality and maintaining required tolerances. Swelling of plastics in fuel is ideally a case of multi physics, which involves modeling of complex mass transfer phenomena. In this study a simple thermal analogous approach has been used to model swelling behavior by characterizing the basic plastic-fuel soaking through coefficient of hygroscopic swelling. Extensive testing has been performed with multiple plastic-fuel combinations with different shapes at different temperatures.

Electrification is one of the megatrends across the industries, like electric vehicles, electric aircraft, etc. which needs advancement in power electronics component technology. As technology advances in miniaturization of power electronics, thermal-management issues threaten to limit the performance of these devices. These may force designers to derate the device performance and ultimately these compromise in design may increase the size & weight of the application. One of the technologies capable of accomplishing these goals employs a class of materials know as metal foam. Metal foams are lightweight cellular materials inspired by nature. The main application of metal foams can be grouped into structural and functional and are based on several excellent properties of the material. Structural applications take advantage of the light-weight and specific mechanical properties of metal foam.