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Modern day aerospace, automotive, marine, mechanical and civil structures rely on the advanced composites for their added benefits over conventional metallic structures. The paper investigates the state of the art numerical and experimental feasibility study on a light passenger car mounts subjected to static and dynamic loads, suitable for Indian road conditions. Composite mounts are proposed to replace the traditional metallic mounts. Structural response from loads due to various loading scenarios are analysed and compared with the experimental study. The best way to increase the fuel efficiency without sacrificing safety is to employ fibre reinforced composite materials in the cars. Comparative study between the existing metallic and proposed composite mounts is performed. In the current study, numerical analysis is conducted using commercially available Finite Element software package, MSC NASTRAN and MSC PATRAN..

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used extensively in the optimization of modern passenger car to meet the ever growing need of higher fuel economy, better engine and underbody cooling. One of the way to achieve better fuel economy is to reduce the vehicle overall resistance to flow, know as drag. Vehicle drag is a complex phenomenon governed by vehicle styling, component shape, layout and driving velocity and road conditions. To reduce the drag a lot of aero-parts are used these days such as air-dam, skirts, spoiler, undercover, dams etc. However the design of these aero-parts must be optimized to get the desired result as their addition alone does not guarantee improvement in performance. This paper aims at studying the effect of air-dam height and position on vehicle aerodynamics. Also the effect of air-dam addition was verified using fuel economy simulations.