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Range anxiety is one of the major factors to be dealt with for increasing penetration of EVs in current Automotive market. The major reasons for range anxiety for customers are sparse charging infrastructure availability, limited range of Electric vehicles and range uncertainty due to diverse real-world usage conditions. The uncertainty in real world range can be reduced by increasing the correlation between the testing condition during vehicle development and real-world customer usage condition. This paper illustrates a more accurate test methodology development to derive the real-world range in electric vehicles with experimental validation and system level analysis. A test matrix is developed considering several variables influencing vehicle range like different routes, drive modes, Regeneration levels, customer drive behavior, time of drive, locations, ambient conditions etc.

Commercial transportation is the key pillar of any growing economy. Light and Small commercial vehicles are increasing every day to cater the logistics demand, but there is always a gap between customer’s actual and desired operational efficiency. This is because of lack of organized fleet and efficient fleet operation. The major requirement of fleet owners is timely delivery, high productivity, downtime reduction, real time tracking, etc., Automakers are now providing fleet management application in modern LCV & SCV to satisfy the fleet operator requirement. However, any feature malfunction, consignment mismatch, wrong notification, missed alerts, etc., can incur huge loss to fleet operator and disrupt the entire supply chain. Hence it is very critical to extensively validate the telematics features in fleet management application. This paper explains the approach for exhaustive validation strategy of fleet management applications (B2B) from end user perspective.

Solenoids are type of inductive actuators extensively used in mobility industries as flow control valves. Now a day, the conventional mechanical actuators are replaced by solenoids, because the solenoids have high precision control and faster response within a controlled magnetic field. Solenoids are classified into two types based on the mode of operation. Solenoid is operated either in ON/OFF mode for switching applications or in Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) for high frequency applications. A solenoid consists of two critical parts, one is the reciprocating plunger and another is the static valve case. During higher number of repeated operations, the solenoid plunger hits the valve case and induces wear on the seating surface. The solenoids are also exposed to the corrosive environment in some applications.

The automotive industry in world is facing the problem of reduction of emissions coming out of the engine. Also, the stringent emission norms imposed by the regulating body for transition from BS IV to BS VI urges the auto makers to concentrate on new technologies to reduce the emissions. One of the major emissions coming out of the diesel engine is oxides of nitrogen (NOx) which is detrimental to human health. This NOx emission is formed when the combustion temperature of engine exceeds the threshold limit. There are several methods available to reduce these NOx emissions formed in-cylinder. Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) is one such system, which reduces the NOx emission formed inside the engine by supplying a portion of the exhaust gases. By re-circulating exhaust gases, the air admitted to the engine is diluted. Further, due to the high latent heat of vaporization of water, water vapor tends to absorb more amount of heat that is generated during combustion.

The air pollution is increasing at an alarming rate now a day mainly due to emissions coming out of automotive vehicles. The exhaust emissions gases are hazardous to human health. The increased number of vehicles on road will make the scenario even worse. In order to control the pollution level, the regulatory bodies are now implementing stringent emission norms. In India, the regulatory authorities has framed the transition of BS IV to BS VI emission norms in 2020 by skipping the BS V emission norms which makes the automotive industries to work on more advanced fuel management technologies. It is more tedious to control the tail pipe emissions beyond BS IV emission norms with the conventional carburetor system since it is operating on open loop system. It is evident that in order to meet the stringent emission norms we need to have a closed loop system which controls the Air Fuel Ratio (AFR) close to stoichiometric to increase the conversion efficiency of the catalytic converter.

Solenoids are electro mechanical actuators used in automotive industries as flow control valve. Solenoids replace the conventional mechanical valve since it is having a precise control and faster response. Solenoid is operated either in ON/OFF mode or Pulse Width Modulation mode (PWM). When operated in PWM at a given frequency, the solenoid undergoes finite number of repeated operations. A normally closed solenoid contains two critical parts, one is a plunger, which is a moving part and another is valve case, which is a static part. The plunger hits the valve case during repeated number of operations which undergo extreme wear. Since the functionality and performance of the solenoid mainly rely on the plunger and valve case, it is inevitable to have an optimum material selection in order to achieve higher durability. This paper illustrates the study of material selection for an air control solenoid used for two wheeler application.