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The body structure of a vehicle is constantly under different load cases, and the spot-welded joints are usually the weakest parts, being normally oversized by the designers. This paper drives a study about the optimal number and location of the welding spots in order to improve the durability and performance of a vehicle body node, related to a specific load case. In addition, the manufacturing time and costs reduction are consequences of this optimization. Computational tools are used and a DOE (Design of Experiments) is performed to characterize the problem statistically, through a location changing sensibility analysis. A Finite Elements software was used for analyzing the stress distribution for each case. Therefore, the feasible designs will be chosen considering the best relation between performance and number of welding spots.

The objective of this paper is to simulate the air flow (cold run) inside a single cylinder research engine for different geometries of the piston crown and investigate the influence of them on the Tumble coefficient and Squish. The study was conducted through the software star-CD, with the module es-ice (Expert System - Internal Combustion Engine) and simulations of the air flow with the flat piston were carried out at the first time. Once the simulation methodology was created according to its correlation with the experimental results, the geometry of the piston crown is changed and other numerical simulations are performed. Thereby, with the comparison between the obtained results for different geometries, the air flow inside the combustion chamber can be characterized, and the effects of the geometry changing on the Tumble coefficient, Squish and other flow parameters verified.