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Recently, in the automobile industry, developing a plastic material type distinction system has been highly demanded for plastic recycling. We have developed a handy plastic distinction device which distinguishes between polypropylene (PP) and polyurethane (PU) and also distinguishes between 3 types of plastic wheel caps according to the electrostatic capacity and the light reflection pattern of the plastic. The device is operated by a dry battery (9V), so that it can be easily placed in the recovery field of waste automobile plastic parts.

Recently, active control technology of vehicles has extensively been developed. An experimental vehicle with independent hydro-pneumatic suspensions was constructed in our laboratory for the improvements in vehicle dynamics and ride-comfort. The vehicle includes a controller, mainly consisting of a multi-processor system with 5 CPUs. By combining this new system with a common bus, all CPUs can immediately access peripherals impartially without particular software. The CPUs can also acquire the data of sensors from the memory in the A/D module at any time without special software. The CPUs are shared to synthetically control the attitude and vibration of each vehicle wheel. Therefore, high capacity is exhibited by a simple system at low cost. The performance of the controller was examined by actual running tests using the experimental vehicle, confirming the improvements in vehicle dynamics and ride-comfort, such as reduction in roll angle and vibration.

The wheel torque measuring system (abbr. WTMS) has been developed for evaluating the torque applied to each wheel of automotive vehicles under actual running conditions. WTMS is a novel type system in which the torque signal is transmitted by a high-performance and compact photo-telemetric coupling system. Within the torque measurement range of ±2.94 kN·m, the resolution of torque output is ±1 N·m so that torque can be measured with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Therefore, measurements can be taken from the high torque applied in the case of a quick accelerating test or a sudden braking test to the measurement of a low amount of torque such as running resistance of a vehicle.