Optimal design and applicability of electric power steering system for automotive platform

The ongoing need for better fuel economy and lower exhaust pollution of vehicles has increased the employment of electric power steering(EPS)in automotives.Optimal design of EPS for a product family reduces the development and fabrication costs significantly.In this paper,the TOPSIS method along with the NSGA-Ⅱis employed to find an optimum family of EPS for an automotive platform.A multi-objective optimization problem is defined considering road feel,steering portability,RMS of Ackerman error,and product family penalty function(PFPF)as the conflicting objective functions.The results for the single objective optimization problems and the ones for the multi-objective optimization problem,as well as two suggested trade-off design points are presented,compared and discussed.For the two suggested points,performance at one objective function is deteriorated by about 1%,while the commonality is increased by 20%–40%,which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method in first finding the non-dominated design points and then selecting the trade-off among the obtained points.The results indicate that the obtained trade-off points have superior performance within the product family with maximum number of common parts.

Two-dimensional Modeling of a Salt-gradient Solar Pond with Wall Shading Effect and Thermo-physical Properties Dependent on Temperature and Concentration

In this paper,the behavior of a salt-gradient solar pond with the square cross-section has been studied experimentally and numerically.A small-scale solar pond were designed and built to provide quantitative data.A two-dimensional,transient heat and mass transfer model has been solved numerically by using finite-control-volume method.In this study,all the thermo-physical properties are variable as the function of temperature and salt concentration.Numerical results as obtained for the experimental pond have been satisfactorily compared and validated against measured data.Furthermore,the wall shading effect has been elaborated to improve the agreement between two sets of results.The temperature of the storage zone is predicted well by the model.It also can be observed that the initial concentration profile is preserved with time.The stability of the pond in time has been investigated in order to distinguish the critical zones.Finally,the application of an energy analysis gives an efficiency of about 12%for the pond.

Elastic Mechanical Stress Analysis in a 2D-FGM Thick Finite Length Hollow Cylinder with Newly Developed Material Model

In this paper a new 2D-FGM material model based on Mori-Tanaka scheme and third-order transition function has been developed for a thick hollow cylinder of finite length.Elastic mechanical stress analysis is performed by utilizing the finite element method.The corresponding material,displacement and stress distributions are evaluated for different values of nr and nz.Moreover,the effects of different material property distributions on the effective stress with respect to the metallic phase volume fraction are investigated.It is demonstrated that the increase in nr and V_m leads to a significant reduction in the effective stress.Finally,it is shown that the ceramic phase rich cylinder wall has lower maximum effective stresses of which the lowest value of effective stress has been evaluated for nr=20 and nz=5.This minimum value is about half the maximum effective stress which has been evaluated for the non-FGM cylinder case（nr=nz=0.1）.