New advances in vehicular technology and automotive engineering

An automobile was seen as a simple accessory of luxury in the early years of the past century. Therefore, it was an expensive asset which none of the common citizen could afford. It was necessary to pass a long period and waiting for Henry Ford to establish the first plants with the series fabrication. This new industrial paradigm makes easy to the common American to acquire an automobile, either for running away or for working purposes. Since that date, the automotive research grown exponentially to the levels observed in the actuality. Now, the automobiles are indispensable goods; saying with other words, the automobile is a first necessity article in a wide number of aspects of living: for workers to allow them to move from their homes into their workplaces, for transportation of students, for allowing the domestic women in their home tasks, for ambulances to carry people with decease to the hospitals, for transportation of materials, and so on, the list don’t ends. The new goal pursued by the automotive industry is to provide electric vehicles at low cost and with high reliability. This commitment is justified by the oil’s peak extraction on 50s of this century and also by the necessity to reduce the emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere, as well as to reduce the needs of this even more valuable natural resource. In order to achieve this task and to improve the regular cars based on oil, the automotive industry is even more concerned on doing applied research on technology and on fundamental research of new materials. The most important idea to retain from the previous introduction is to clarify the minds of the potential readers for the direct and indirect penetration of the vehicles and the vehicular industry in the today’s life. In this sequence of ideas, this book tries not only to fill a gap by presenting fresh subjects related to the vehicular technology and to the automotive engineering but to provide guidelines for future research. This book account with valuable contributions from worldwide experts of automotive’s field. The amount and type of contributions were judiciously selected to cover a broad range of research. The reader can found the most recent and cutting-edge sources of information divided in four major groups: electronics (power, communications, optics, batteries, alternators and sensors), mechanics (suspension control, torque converters, deformation analysis, structural monitoring), materials (nanotechnology, nanocomposites, lubrificants, biodegradable, composites, structural monitoring) and manufacturing (supply chains). We are sure that you will enjoy this book and will profit with the technical and scientific contents. To finish, we are thankful to all of those who contributed to this book and who made it possible.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Assessing the sustainability performance of inter-urban intelligent transport

The implementation of ITS to increase the efficiency of saturated highways has become increasingly prevalent. It is a high level objective for many international governments and operators that highways should be managed in a way that is both sustainable i.e. environmental, social and economically sound and supportive of a Low-Carbon-Energy Future. Some clarity is therefore needed to understand how Intelligent Transport Systems perform within the constraints of that objective. This thesis describes the development of performance criteria that reflect the contributions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) emissions, vehicle emissions and the embedded carbon within the physical transport infrastructure that typically comprises three types of Intelligent Transport System. Active Traffic Management, Intelligent Speed Adaptation and the Automated Highway System are a collection of systems designed to transform the road network into a highly efficient and congestion free transport solution and all possess varying levels of uncertainty in terms of sustainability performance. The performance criteria form part of a new framework methodology ‘EnvFUSION’ (Environmental Fusion for ITS) outlined here. An attributional LCA and c-LCA (consequential lifecycle assessment) are both undertaken which forms part of a data fusion process using data from various sources. The models forecast improvements for the three ITS technologies in-line with social acceptability, economic profitability and major carbon reduction scenarios up to 2050 on one of the UK's most congested highways. Analytical Hierarchy Process and Dempster-Shafer theory are used to weight criteria which form part of an Intelligent Transport Sustainability Index. Overall performance is then synthesized. Results indicate that there will be a substantial increase in socio-economic and emissions benefits, provided that the policies are in place and targets are reached which would otherwise delay their realisation. To conclude, an integrated strategic performance management framework is proposed which performs socio-technical comparisons of four key performance areas between ITS schemes in order to identify energy and emission hotspots