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Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering

, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp 102–112 | Cite as

Smart product design for automotive systems

  • A. Galip Ulsoy
Open Access
Feature Article
First Online:
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Abstract

Automobiles evolved from primarily mechanical to electro-mechanical, or mechatronic, vehicles. For example, carburetors have been replaced by fuel injection and air-fuel ratio control, leading to order of magnitude improvements in fuel economy and emissions. Mechatronic systems are pervasive in modern automobiles and represent a synergistic integration of mechanics, electronics and computer science. They are smart systems, whose design is more challenging than the separate design of their mechanical, electronic and computer/control components. In this review paper, two recent methods for the design of mechatronic components are summarized and their applications to problems in automotive control are highlighted. First, the combined design, or co-design, of a smart artifact and its controller is considered. It is shown that the combined design of an artifact and its controller can lead to improved performance compared to sequential design. The coupling between the artifact and controller design problems is quantified, and methods for co-design are presented. The control proxy function method, which provides ease of design as in the sequential approach and approximates the performance of the co-design approach, is highlighted with application to the design of a passive/active automotive suspension. Second, the design for component swapping modularity (CSM) of a distributed controller for a smart product is discussed. CSM is realized by employing distributed controllers residing in networked smart components, with bidirectional communication over the network. Approaches to CSM design are presented, as well as applications of the method to a variable-cam-timing engine, and to enable battery swapping in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

Keywords

mechatronics automotive control co-design component swapping modularity active suspensions variable camshaft timing engine plug-in hybrid electric vehicle 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The author is pleased to acknowledge the collaborators on this research, i.e., Profs. P.Y. Papalambros and I.V. Kolmanovsky, as well as Drs. J. Reyer, H.K. Fathy, S.F. Alyaqout, D.L. Peters, M. Çakmakcı, S. Li and A. Ghaffari. The research featured in this article was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S.A. Army Automotive Research Center, the Ford Motor Company, and United Technologies, Inc.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://doi.org/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, and a link is provided to the Creative Commons license, indicating if changes were made.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborUSA

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