Detroit’s annual festival of foul weather and vehicular fascination draws enough industry bigwigs that the companies hoping to sell technology to said bigwigs generally colonize the halls and meeting areas above the Cobo show floor. As ever, we snooped around to bring you some of the cool gadgets and gizmos that promise to improve your automobility in the years to come.
Schaeffler Electromechanical Level Adjustment
Why must all kneeling, ride-height-adjustable suspensions employ air bladder springs? Let’s face it, the air eventually wants out of those things. Show me the ’58 Pontiac Bonneville resting in a junkyard with its “Ever-Level” air suspension fully aired up if you disagree. Schaeffler is readying a system that retains the conventional spring and damper and merely inserts an electrically operated ball-screw jack. The system displayed offers 1.6 inches of adjustment and locks in one of three positions so that electrical energy isn’t required to maintain a certain level. It could be used for off-roaders or to economically lower just the front of any vehicle at highway speeds to reduce airflow under the car, improving aero drag and boosting fuel economy by as much as 3.2 percent.
Ford Raptor 10-Speed Automatic
Upstairs in Ford’s own display, the company divulged a tiny bit of information about its hotly anticipated new 10-speed automatic transmission, a joint development project with General Motors. What we know about it so far is that it will feature six under-drive ratios, a direct-drive seventh gear, and three overdrives with an overall ratio spread (first gear ratio divided by tenth-gear ratio) of 7.4. The usefulness of all these ratios is to provide excellent torque-multiplication in off-road rock crawling at low speeds, to permit the engine to operate nearer its peak horsepower for more of the time during hard acceleration, while the top-end ratios are tall enough to keep engine revs low (and hence the workload and throttle opening) high for peak highway efficiency. High-efficiency filtration and new transmission fluid chemistry provides fill-for-life ease of maintenance. Raptors will also get paddle-shifting.
Faurecia Exhaust Dynamic Sound Technologies
Faurecia produces the exhaust system for today’s Mustang 2.0-liter EcoBoost engine and, boy, do we hope Ford pops for this upgrade, which should be ready for production by 2017 (on any manufacturer’s cars—it’s by no means confirmed for Mustang). The system places a pair of extremely robust 6-inch speakers with Kevlar cones in their own enclosures connecting to the dual exhaust pipes just a bit upstream from where they exit at the tail of the car (no exhaust passes over or by them). These speakers can add or subtract any resonant frequencies the customer desires. Press a button and you’d by-golly swear you were standing behind a burbling GT 5.0 V-8 Mustang. The GT350R’s flat-plane-crank V-8’s unique sound signature could also be programmed, with volume levels and sound signatures potentially keyed to various drive modes. Pricing is about in line with other high-performance aftermarket exhaust systems.
Faurecia Resonance Free Pipe
As sound waves bounce down a pipe, they eventually hit resonance frequencies that can sound loud and obnoxious. Exhaust system designers typically install mufflers and resonators to stymie these resonant waves, but knowing the frequency of the sound waves and the shape of the pipe it is possible to prevent those resonant frequencies from forming or reinforcing each other. Faurecia strategically applies microperforated screen material at location(s) along the pipe. These vent acoustic energy along with a tiny bit of exhaust (it is always placed after all catalysts), often quieting the exhaust enough to eliminate the 4-11-pound mass of a resonator. Part costs are negligible, but figuring out where to put them is where the intellectual property comes in.
Schaeffler Electric Axle
More vehicles are being electrified, and typical front-drive hybrids can easily offer AWD by sticking an electric motor on the rear axle. Schaeffler’s comes with a planetary geartrain that provides both a low and high gear ratio to expand the efficient operating range of the 60-kW motor, but it’s even able to provide torque vectoring with the addition of a second, smaller 6-kW motor adding or subtracting torque from one wheel or another. According to VP and CTO Jeff Hemphill, a demonstrator vehicle fitted with one of these motors front and rear has been made to spin about its own axis skid-steer Bobcat style as a demonstration of the system’s capabilities (this is not envisioned as a useful product feature).
Faurecia Active Wellness Seat
As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, it seems only natural that we’ll connect more closely with our car — perhaps via the seat. Faurecia’s Active Wellness Seat is described as the “ultimate wearable device.” Using an array of four pressure-sensitive piezo-electric sensors layered between the outer surface and the padding of the backrest and another four on the bottom cushion, the seat is capable of determining the occupant’s pulse and respiration rates. This data can be used to sense driver drowsiness or stress index, whereupon it can initiate an invigorating massage or a calming one along with appropriate seat heating or ventilation. It could also be used to transmit vital signs to first responders after an accident or incapacitation. A DARPA program sought to sense these vital signs passively from stretchers to aid battlefield triage efforts, and this effort stemming from that research has been conducted in partnership with NASA, Ohio State University, and medical-device firm Hoana. The sensors are commodity items currently, but developing the robust signal processing algorithms to tease pulse and respiration data out of the vibration environment of a moving car is a work in progress. The Kia Telluride concept featured a similar seat.
Schaeffler Electric Power Brakes
Now that practically every new car gets electric power steering, isn’t it about time that we got electric power brakes? Most brake boosters still use vacuum assist, but modern, direct injected high-efficiency engines don’t make enough vacuum to run such a system safely, so they need an electric vacuum gauge. It’s way simpler and more efficient to simply use another ball-screw drive connected to a high-precision electric motor to help the driver depress the brake pedal. Similar drives have been in use to actuate parking brakes for some time, and now EPB is nearing production.
Schaeffler Transmission-Driven Accessory Drive
We’ve been reporting that 48-volt mild-hybrid systems are about to hit the big time, and Schaeffler provides several approaches, from e-machines incorporated into dual-clutch transmissions to pancake motors incorporated in torque converters, but an intriguing idea is to clutch a motor to the “road” side of the transmission and connect it to power-hungry accessories like the transmission oil pressure, engine coolant, and vacuum pumps. This setup eliminates three motors and their associated relays, and when coasting or slowing to a stop, it’s possible to capture more energy, because the road is providing the roughly 2 kW these ancillary devices consume while the electric motor maxes out the 12-15 kW-hr it can regenerate. The motor can also assist the engine or extend engine-off “sailing” at highway speeds.
ZF External Pre-Crash Side Airbag
There’s so little time and so little space in which to absorb side impact forces, that ZF TRW is testing out a super-tough internally tethered exterior airbag that deploys upward from the lower rocker panel of a vehicle to shield its door(s). It would be triggered by a vehicle’s around-sensing cameras and/or blind-spot monitoring radar units just in advance of a side impact.
ZF Rear-Seat Airbags
Rear seat occupants tend to range in age and size much greater than front-seat occupants, so improving frontal-crash survivability in back is more complicated. ZF TRW showed two concepts. A roof-mounted bag is an adaptation of a similar bag-in-roof concept previously shown for front-passenger installations. Used in conjunction with a seatbelt pretensioner and belt-force limiter, it greatly reduces the likelihood of an occupant contacting the front seat, and the roof structure provides a robust attachment point to resist occupant forces. For cars without a fixed roof or with panoramic sunroofs, there is a front-seat-mounted system designed to fill the widely variable distance between front and rear seats with a broad arch-shape design. Such a system obviously requires a reinforced seatback support structure.
Nexteer Automotive Magnasteer with Torque Overlay
Autonomous cars are coming, but they might end up following autonomous trucks to market. Bigger 3/4-ton, Class 4 and larger trucks are not typically ideal candidates for electric power steering, so Nexteer has fortified its Magnasteer product to be able to perform various functions electric steering usually performs. Up until now Magnasteer used magnetic force to add or subtract to the effort felt at the wheel, but now this “torque overlay” is great enough to actively steer a large truck with the normal hydraulic assist doing all the hard work. These new features include rough-road input damping, lead/pull compensation on road crowns, wind gust mitigation, lane keeping assistance, park assist, vehicle stability control, and yaw stability control. The system launched on the 2016 GMC Sierra HD and Chevrolet Silverado HD 3/4 Ton Trucks just as NAIAS opened to the press.
Schaeffler iTC Integrated Torque Converter Lockup
Torque converters typically involve an impeller attached to the engine that “blows” hydraulic fluid into a turbine attached, via gearing, to the road. This allows the engine to spin while the car is stopped and provides torque multiplication. Locking these elements together improves efficiency, and is usually done with a clutch mounted to the back of one of these elements. Schaeffler has designed a clutch that mounts around the periphery of these two elements, increasing the packaging diameter of the device, but freeing up the valuable longitudinal space for e-motors or (more often) pendulum mass dampers that absorb vibration. The design saves mass and fractionally improves torque converter efficiency by largely closing the gap through which some fluid inevitably escapes around the outer edge between the impeller and turbine.
Faurecia Intuition HMI Cockpit
Intuitive functionality is the goal of every cockpit, and to enhance it in this concept, every action brings an intuitive tactile and visual confirmation. Touch the capacitive aluminum control panel for the climate and audio controls, and they vibrate and illuminate, with the temp slider (and possibly even backlighting behind the “Deco” vents) changing from blue to red. The driver’s smart phone starts the car, sliding into an inductive charging slot behind the central infotainment screen. This screen can pivot to the passenger, enabling different content. Other cool features: Faurecia has tooling that can apply disparate laminate materials (stone, wood, carbon fiber, for example) to the same part in one operation (that’s stone in the center of the dash). And a new loom Faurecia has developed works like a 3D printer, forming complex shapes like pockets and slots with no little or no scrap (it is not yet ready to produce high-volume production parts).
KSPG Liteks Lightweight Piston
KSPG’s new Liteks gasoline-engine piston is 10 percent lighter, thanks in some part to the use of KS-309 aluminum alloy, but also to the incorporation of an integral oil cooling gallery that cools the piston enough to allow the piston-crown thickness to be reduced by 30 percent. This cooling passage rings the piston crown and is fed at bottom-dead-center of the piston stroke by a jet that shoots oil at an inlet to this cooling gallery. Diesels have used similar technology for some time. The top piston ring is also seated in a special iron slot that is cast into the aluminum piston. Pretty high tech.
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