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Crash analysis is an important step in modern day design of vehicles to satisfy the standards laid down by various agencies. In order to satisfy the standards, the designs should adopt energy absorbing members that are efficient and thus optimization becomes important. Modern design practices now provide procedures for this optimization involving shapes. Because each crash analysis takes considerable computer time, Design of Experiments (DOE) methods are used to generate the response surface on which the optimum is searched using approximate or meta models that consume less computational time. This paper describes methods to achieve shape optimization of the identified members which absorb the energy to a maximum possible value.

Noise computations are carried out for sunroof opening in automotives at a resonating speed. First, the behavior of baseline opening shape is analyzed through frequency spectrum obtained from acoustic analysis. Then the opening shape is changed to reduce the sound pressure level of buffeting noise. The analysis with new shape is able to reduce the Noise dB levels up to 5dB. Commercial software, Fluent, is used to compute the turbulent flow field. Large-Eddy Simulation is used for better prediction of fluctuating components. Acoustic results obtained from Ffowcs-Williams and Hawkings equations are well compared with other's work.

In recent years, increasing use is being made of computational methods to aid in the understanding of the flow complexities around vehicles and as a result many areas of a car have been studied for numerical solution. Two simulations are made, one for the flow around an Ahmed body and the other of the flow around a simplified high speed passenger car. The former simulation of airflow over Ahmed body is investigated using Fluent in which the configurations included different rear slant angles. The aim of studying such a simplified car body is to understand the flow processes involved in drag production. Through understanding the mechanisms involved in generating drag one should be able to design a car to minimize drag and therefore minimize fuel consumption and maximize performance.