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‘To achieve more from less’ has been the oft-quoted phrase in auto industry for quite some time. This philosophy has many analogies like fuel efficiency, modularity, weight reduction, alternative fuels etc. Of these ‘modularity’ is seen as an effective tool, especially for automotive OEMs catering to a wide portfolio of similar products. This paper discusses the implications of modularization on a passenger bus OEM, by taking the ‘bus super structure’ as a test case. The modularized bus structure is compared with the conventional structure for design strength, safety, weight and more importantly manufacturing flexibility. The challenges faced in each of these aspects are discussed. From the study it was understood that the task of manufacturing body modules and interfaces is complex and it calls for a complete revamp of existing fixtures, material handling equipment and even the prescribed tolerances.

Automotive industry is progressively embracing newer technology for buses, as they are increasingly becoming the backbone of urban transportation. Buses are generally classified based on floor heights, lengths, seating capacity and applications besides lot of other parameters. Generally low floor / low entry buses are used for city transportation, while high floor / high deck buses are used for inter urban and intercity transportation. Yet in a few developing and underdeveloped geographies across the globe, high deck or the semi low floor buses are still used for city/urban transportation. There could be a lot of reasons like infrastructure limitations, the cost of ownership or in some cases even the topology of these geographies could be unfriendly towards low floor buses and low ground clearances. Varying customer requirements, applications and environmental factors necessitates a broad range of offerings from any bus OEM.

In today's world with a dynamic market and varying customer expectations, it becomes inevitable that we find means of recognizing customer needs with all dimensions and instill them as inherent specifications of a product. Automobiles no way fall away from these intangible demands of the changing world, as personal conveyance (car/motorcycle/scooter) nowadays is more of a basic need. It becomes more of challenge to automotive manufacturers, to offer continuously improving quality products, at competitive prices to be in business. It's very important that as automotive designers we recognize quality in its totality and establish a predictive methodology to inculcate quality into the design at early stages of vehicle development.

The primary factors influencing vehicle's dynamic behavior are the vehicle hard point definition, driver behavior and road inputs. The more the latter two are random and incorrigible in nature, the former one is quantifiable and can be controlled from designer's standpoint. In this paper, we have made an attempt to set targets to the vehicle hard point definition and thereby to optimize the vehicle for better ride behavior. This approach hence helped to converge to vehicle specifications set fundamentally designed to respond to random operating conditions and driving behavior intelligently. The work also involves study of various methodologies to predict roll, pitch, bounce and dive behaviors on a typical commercial passenger vehicle and is concluded by a sensitivity analysis to understand significance of these hard points on vehicle's real time behavior.

Fuel consumption has been a core consideration since the beginning of the transportation era. These are reasons related to our environment, and to economics. In the competitive truck industry fuel consumption is an important sales argument, since customers on an average drive their trucks for distances of 150 000 km per year, which means that fuel becomes a large part of the lifetime cost for a vehicle. Existing braking system design in commercial vehicles are basically air assisted, which utilizes the compressed air from reservoir, which is being replenished based on requirement by a positive displacement compressor, generally driven directly by vehicle power pack. In this paper, an effort has been made to partially use the energy stored in the springs (induced due to road undulations) for compressed air generation through a single acting positive displacement pump.

Fuel consumption for heavy trucks depends on many factors like roads, weather, and driver behaviour that are hard for a manufacturer to influence. However, one design possibility is the power-train configuration. In this paper, driveline of a heavy-duty truck is optimised using the six-sigma methodology. The focus of the task is selection of a power train configuration that gives the lowest fuel consumption for each transportation task. To reduce fuel consumption, it is important to choose a powertrain combination (gearbox, rear axle, tire dimension) that allows efficient use of the engine. Such an optimization of powertrain configuration is a complex task, but current simulation techniques provide means to reduce costly testing by replacing it partly with analysis. The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve & Control) steps are followed to generate alternate solutions of the descriptive problem.

Fuel consumption for heavy trucks depends on many factors like roads, weather, and driver behavior that are hard for a manufacturer to influence. However, one design possibility is the power-train configuration. Here a new simulation program for heavy trucks is created and the configuration of the power-train that gives the lowest fuel consumption for each transport task is selected based on the simulation results. In this work, the operational conditions have been considered i.e. load, pavement, transmission efficiency and the building characteristics of the engine map, transmission, frontal area, tire. In this paper, we present a simulation software that enables a vehicle manufacturer or a customer to choose the right driveline for the customized application, depending on the acceleration and the fuel economy needs.