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The hub driven motors are some of the simpler versions of powertrain to implement an electric motor in a vehicle, hybrid or pure electric. The mechanical simplicity of this concept sounds good for mass reduction, energy efficiency and costs. Also, the split through the road hybrid vehicle concept is very promisor. The opportunity to combine these two concepts is a good chance to develop a simpler hybrid vehicle. However, this concept increases the unsprung mass of the vehicle. The increased mass can deteriorate the cars ride and handling. The objective of this work is to measure the impact of addiction of unsprung mass due to this motor concept in rear axle and evaluate some opportunities to reduce these impacts, with the help of a numerical half car vehicle model and the DOE technique.

The multibody computational simulation is a typically toll used to verify the vehicle dynamic behavior. In this environment, the shock absorber damping curve can be described with a curve considering the force and the speed that are acting on the shock absorber F=f(v) or making this curve as function of force, speed and displacement F=f(v,d). However in the real world the damping curves (F=f(v)), changes during the shock absorber travel. In this case, it is natural to include the displacement variable in the damping modeling making the shock absorber force a function of speed and displacement F=f(v,d). This study will compare how the consideration of each type of curve will affects the simulation results and what kind of dynamic event is relevant to adopt one of the studied shock absorber modeling types.

Analytical models are very useful to the vehicle dynamics project engineer in order to provide simple solutions that bring at the same time a deep understanding of the physical phenomena being studied. Due to their structure, the input of analytical models are only the variables of interest affecting the concerned handling metrics - this fact reduce the parameters quantity to build the same model, making them proper choices for advanced studies. Additionally, analytical models are more efficient in computational terms, aspect convenient for studies that involve large amounts of calculation iterations like numerical optimization processes. This paper presents analytical model results for the roll gradient, understeer gradient and steering sensitivity metrics and proposes enhancements in order to obtain results with accuracy compatible to the experimental measured variables.

This paper aims to demonstrate the development of an control arm elastomeric bushing to be applied in a compact vehicle that initially works with a hydraulic bushing and presents noise problems. The laboratorial tests shown that the elastomeric bushing has similar performance to the hydraulic one, regarding stiffness and fatigue. When applied on vehicle, it was proved that the elastomeric bushing has good performance regarding handling, durability and the most part of ride requirements, being better than hydraulic bushing in some of the items, although is not so good in other ones. In conclusion, for an unbalance till 10 grams, the new elastomeric bushing has similar behavior when compared to hydraulic bushing, in fatigue and durability performance, solving the noise problem and getting substantial cost reduction for the component, and could be applied as an option to replace the hydraulic bushing.

With the strong competition of the automotive market, aspects as quality and cost become priority in the search of competitiveness. Several companies work in proposals seeking cost reduction without quality loss. Several vehicles inside of Brazilian market use the hydraulic mount at their engine mount system, the initial proposal search the substitution of this kind of mount by an elastomeric mount. Following this proposal, we have this article that intends to compare the behavior between the hydraulic mount and elastomeric mount. Besides the researched bibliography, we accomplished the practical comparative study. We observed that the elastomeric mount presented substantial improvement since the seventies improving its isolation vibration performance at high frequency range. The hydraulic mount presents high damping at low frequency range but its isolation vibration performance at high frequency doesn't overcome the performance of the elastomeric mount.