A new method for monitoring the corrosion of copper by automatic transmission fluid additives through the measurement of the electrical resistance of copper wires is presented. The effect of driveline lubricant additive components upon the corrosion rate of copper is discussed. The information on corrosion generated by this method provides details of the corrosion processes that are not obtained from traditional corrosion tests and insight as to how to formulate oils to better protect copper and copper alloys.

View full abstract

Recently Ultra High Strength Steel sheet (UHSS) has been adopted in automotive stamping industry to reduce the weight and enhance the safety of automobile. However, the application of the UHSS sheet faced some difficulty such as die wear and related problems due to high contact pressure on the die surface during the stamping process. In this study, wear tests of pin-on-disc (POD) type were performed to evaluate wear characteristics for the UHSS sheets under dry and lubricated conditions. For five kinds of coatings (TiCN, CrN, TiAlCrN, TiN and TD) on the SKD11 substrate and the uncoated substrates, wear resistances of those die materials under relatively contact sliding with three UHSS sheets was evaluated by the wear chacteristics; the wear mass loss, the curve between the coefficient of friction, sliding distance, and galling initiation distance. Among those coatings, the CrN coating shows the best anti-wear performances, respectively.

View full abstract

This paper presents a new method to detect lane changes of other vehicles automatically. The main contribution of this work is to propose a new feature using a potential field that changes the distribution depending on the relative number of adjacent vehicles. Previous researches have considered only some of limited situations, for example, that the preceding vehicle is slower than the target vehicle. Therefore, degradation of the detection performance can occur under conditions that were not considered. On the other hand, the new feature we propose is able to describe general lane-changing situations by applying a dynamic potential model. We trained an estimation model and evaluated the performance using a traffic dataset with over 900 lane changes. It was confirmed that the proposed method outperforms previous methods in terms of both accuracy and early detection.

View full abstract

The challenge for the development of future gasoline and diesel engine families is further increase of efficiency at increasing cost .pressure. Downsizing as a main engine trend for significant CO2 reduction with increased loads on the engine systems as well as engine lifetime requirements have a considerable impact on the layout and the quality requirements of timing drives. In the paper the main timing drive concepts, chain drive, dry belt and wet belt were analyzed and rated based on the functional influencing factors as target parameters to allow a scientifically based guidance for finding the most suitable timing drive concept.

View full abstract

To realize driver assistance systems based on automated driving technologies, intelligent vehicles need to recognize surrounding driving environments. On this point, sensing technologies with high-cost sensors have several problems for future popularization. Therefore, this research aimed at developing automated driving technologies with lean sensors via the enhancement of existing ADAS Horizon. As a result of experiments for confirming the feasibility of our system, we completed autonomous driving on a test course with several temporary stops and left turns.

View full abstract

The programmable Hall Effect Sensing Element developed by Continental allows measuring camshaft and crankshaft positions precisely. This is essential for modern cars designing clean vehicles with increased engine power efficiency and minimized fuel consumption. The high flexibility of the sensing element programming allows adapting the sensor to all customer requirements and various engine environments. The sensing element is particularly robust against temperature variations during stop-start and target wheel vibrations at power-up by preventing any wrong calibration then. The choice of the application and programming of associated parameters is done at the End-of-Line thanks to a dedicated communication protocol and an embedded EEPROM.

View full abstract