Mobility and Vehicle Mechanics

1-13

Authors: Jakub Kwapisz, Manuel M. Freitas, Virginia Infante

There are few manufacturers that produce busses and light rail vehicles. Those manufacturers include Bombarider, Siemems, and Solaris among the others. During the case study conducted in one of the manufacturers and presented in this paper, it turned out that potential benefits coming from sharing components between different products are not realized. A great problem for any manufacturer is the engineering effort necessary to produce every set of products for a particular client. One of the solutions for a manufacturer is to use common components in locations not visible for customers and customized elements for product differentiation. Commonality increases quality, prevents resource waste, decreases costs and, most importantly, decreases total development time of the product by eliminating unnecessary development steps of individual components. After a detailed analysis of the car body shell (CBS) components in the light railways and trams, it turned out that there are parts that can be potentially common. The most interesting elements for further study were floor and roof panels. Our hypothesis is that number of profile solutions solution may be reduced and common not only across different rail vehicles, but as well busses. The key problem this research paper investigate is commonality opportunity of reusing the same design for aluminum panels in different light rail and bus applications. Long extrusion is a specific process that takes a long time to set up for final production. The commonality of the aluminum panel concept across different product could lead to decreased development and manufacturing time, and reduce cost. The finite element method (FEM) numerical simulations were performed using the nonlinear commercial finite element software HyperWorks v12 in order to determine properties of different panels already produced by the company and additional optimised panels created during this study. Additional information about panels was gathered from different company division such as industrialization, manufacturing and procurement in order to make final decision which aluminum panel should be shared across different products. The paper is constructed from five chapters. First is an introduction to the problem and conducted research. The second chapter is an industrial case study which was performed in one of the leading manufacturers or railway and road vehicles. The third chapter describes results coming from this case and especially results of the final element analysis. The fourth chapter is a further discussion about commonality possibilities and description of additional information that had to be considered before making a final decision. In the last chapter, there are conclusions coming from this research that can be generalized to other applications. This research paper is very valuable for both academia and practitioners. It present a study area that can be further investigated by different researchers and applied to different companies by practitioners. It turned out that commonality is very beneficial and every company should implement it to some extent. A researcher could collaborate with industry as it was done in our case in order to implement state of art methodologies and solutions together.

29-37

Authors: Branislav Popović, Dragan Milčić, Miodrag Milčić

System for motor vehicle cooling is one of the most important systems for safety of internal combustion engine (IC engine), and engine cooling fan motor is a key subsystem of this system. It ensures that engine operating temperature is within allowed limits and it protects engine from failure of entire internal combustion engine, and vehicle in whole. This engine cooling fan motor is a key subsystem for vehicle air conditioning as well, because it cools air conditioning system cooler at the same time. Radiator cooling fan motor consists from DC engine and radiator cooling fan. DC engine is a subsystem of mentioned systems which has the most important influence on no failure engine cooling fan work, and according to that, on no failure work of engine cooling system and vehicle air conditioning system. The main subject of this paper is development of engine cooling fan from the reliability aspect, in fact, according to required work life of 3000 hours.

53-64

Authors: Rajko Radonjić, Danijela Miloradović, Dragoljub Radonjić

Vehicle’s performance is in relation with its structure, design parameters and interaction with the environment. The domain of the vehicle research is a typical example of interconnectedness and interdependence of theory and experiment. In this paper, problems of combining mathematics - simulation and experimental research of vehicles are considered. The appropriate simulation models are formed and necessary preliminary experiments were carried out. A concept of augmented system with extended Kalman filter is realized and used. Some illustrative results of the research done by this methodology are presented and discussed.