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In the past few years the automotive industry has shown an increasing concern on safety issues and predicting the right behavior of vehicle structures under crash situations has been a great preoccupation. CAE has a major role in crash validations, especially when predicting the rupture of fuel tanks, since avoiding any leaks has a great importance on the occupant's safety. Crash simulation of fuel tanks is a standard when developing this kind of product. However, with the increasing demand on more accurate models, new necessities appear. Accounting for the changes that the fabrication process makes on material properties is beginning to be a reality, especially with metal forming that brings local thinning and residual stresses to the fuel tank. In an attempt to build a more accurate model and to study the effect of local changes of material properties on the output of a crash analysis, this paper combines stamping and crash simulations.

Fuel filling systems are a very important part of the entire fuel system since they are responsible for making the interaction between the user and the fuel tank, ensuring that it is properly refueled. Guaranteeing that the system is able to refuel the tank while all the gases inside it are properly expelled, without provoking an over-pressure inside the system is very important. Designing both breathing and filling pipes of the system has a major influence on its behavior. This work intends to calculate the minimum cross section for each pipe that allows the proper function of the system on an early stage of the development process, by applying the extended Bernoulli Equation on preliminary configuration of a fuel filling system, using numerical calculation tools as SciLab and Open Foam.

With the increasing demand to provide customers with a comfort-car based air-conditioning system, this paper is aimed at providing a value engineering assessment on air-conditioning based on the Brazilian customers perception of what effectively adds value to the system. In market regions like Europe and United States, the A/C installation rate is above 90%, while in South America is still around 40%. If it becomes more affordable or its value for the customer increases, the A/C system can be a strong vehicle selling factor, specially in the warmer climate regions. Value concept, in the value engineering analysis, is defined by the following equation: Value itself can be defined, on a customer perspective, either by: I. Keeping the cost parameter constant and increasing the performance parameter II. Keeping the performance parameter constant and decreasing the cost parameter, OR BY: III.