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

A Parallel Feature-preserving Mesh Variable Offsetting Method with Dynamic Programming

Mesh offsetting plays an important role in discrete geometric processing. In this paper, we propose a parallel feature-preserving mesh offsetting framework with variable distance. Different from the traditional method based on distance and normal vector, a new calculation of offset position is proposed by using dynamic programming and quadratic programming, and the sharp feature can be preserved after offsetting. Instead of distance implicit field, a spatial coverage region represented by polyhedral for computing offsets is proposed. Our method can generate an offsetting model with smaller mesh size, and also can achieve high quality without gaps, holes, and self-intersections. Moreover, several acceleration techniques are proposed for the efficient mesh offsetting, such as the parallel computing with grid, AABB tree and rays computing. In order to show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed framework, we have tested our method on the quadmesh dataset, which is available at [https://www.quadmesh.cloud]. The source code of the proposed algorithm is available on GitHub at [https://github.com/iGame-Lab/PFPOffset]

Robust volume mesh generation for non-watertight geometries

Nowadays large part of the time needed to perform a numerical simulation is spent in preprocessing, especially in the geometry cleaning operations and mesh generation. Furthermore, these operations are not easy to automatize because they depend strongly on each geometrical model and they often need human interaction. Many of these operations are needed to obtain a watertight geometry. Even with a clean geometry, classical unstructured meshing methods (like Delaunay or Advancing Front based ones) present critical weak points like the need of a given quality in the boundary mesh or a relatively smooth size transition. These aspects decrease their robustness and imply an extra effort in order to reach the final mesh. Octree based meshers try to relax some of these requirements. In the present work an octree based mesher for unstructured tetrahedra is presented. The proposed mesher ensures the mesh generation avoiding most of the geometry cleaning operations. It is based in the following steps: fit an octree onto the model, refine it following given criteria, apply a tetrahedra pattern to the octree cells and adapt the tetrahedra close to the contours in order to represent accurately the boundary shape. An important and innovative aspect of the proposed algorithm is it ensures the final mesh preserves the topology and the geometric features of the original model. The method uses a Ray Casting based algorithm for the identification of the inner and outer parts of the volumes involved in the model. This technique allows the mesh generation of volumes even with non-watertight boundaries, and also opens the use of the mesher for immersed methods only applying slight modifications to the algorithm. The main advantages of the presented mesher are: robustness, no need for watertight boundaries, independent on the contour mesh quality, preservation of geometrical features (corners and ridges), original geometric topology guaranteed, accurate representation of the contours, valid for immersed methods, and fast performance. A lot of time in the preprocessing part of the numerical simulation is saved thanks to the robustness of the mesher, which allows skipping most of the geometry cleaning operations. A shared memory parallel implementation of the algorithm has been done. The effectiveness of the algorithm and its implementation has been verified by some validation examples.En l'actualitat gran part del temps emprat per córrer una simulació numèrica està dedicat al preprocés, especialment a les operacions de neteja de geometria i generació de malla. A més, aquestes operacions no són fàcils d'automatitzar degut a la seva forta dependència del model geomètric i sovint necessiten d’interacció humana. Moltes d'aquestes operacions són necessàries per aconseguir una definició topológicament hermètica de la geometria. Inclús amb una geometria neta, els mètodes clàssics de mallat (com els basats en Delaunay o avançament frontal) presenten punts febles crítics com la necessitat d'una certa qualitat de les malles de contorn o una transició de mides relativament suau. Aquests aspectes disminueixen la seva robustesa i impliquen un esforç extra a l'hora d'obtenir la malla final. Els mètodes de mallat basats en estructures octree relaxen alguns d'aquests requeriments. En aquest treball es presenta un mallador basat en octree per tetraedres no estructurats. Un dels aspectes claus d'aquest mallador és que garanteix la generació de malla evitant moltes de les operacions de neteja de geometria. Es basa en els següents passos: encaixar un octree al model, refinar-lo seguint certs criteris, aplicar un patró de tetraedres a les cel•les de l'octree i adaptar-los a les zones properes als contorns a fi i efecte de representar acuradament la forma del domini. Un aspecte important i innovador de l'algorisme proposat és que manté la topologia del model a la malla final i preserva les seves característiques geomètriques. El mètode presentat utilitza un algorisme basat en la tècnica Ray Casting per la identificació de les parts interiors i exteriors dels volums del model. Aquesta tècnica permet la generació de malla de volums inclús amb contorns que no tanquen hermèticament, i també obre l’ús del mallador a mètodes “immersed” aplicant només petites modificacions a l'algorisme. Els principals avantatges del mallador presentat són: robustesa, no necessitat de definicions hermètiques dels contorns, independent de la qualitat de la malla de contorn, preservació de característiques geomètriques (cantonades i arestes abruptes), topologia original de la geometria garantida, representació precisa dels contorns, vàlid per mètodes “immersed” i ràpid rendiment. L’ús del mallador estalvia molt de temps en la part del preprocés de la simulació numèrica gràcies a la seva robustesa que permet obviar la majoria d'operacions de neteja de geometria. S'ha dut a terme una implementació paral•lela amb memòria compartida de l'algorisme. L'efectivitat del mateix i la seva implementació ha estat verificada mitjançant exemples de validació

Scalable Realtime Rendering and Interaction with Digital Surface Models of Landscapes and Cities

Interactive, realistic rendering of landscapes and cities differs substantially from classical terrain rendering. Due to the sheer size and detail of the data which need to be processed, realtime rendering (i.e. more than 25 images per second) is only feasible with level of detail (LOD) models. Even the design and implementation of efficient, automatic LOD generation is ambitious for such out-of-core datasets considering the large number of scales that are covered in a single view and the necessity to maintain screen-space accuracy for realistic representation. Moreover, users want to interact with the model based on semantic information which needs to be linked to the LOD model. In this thesis I present LOD schemes for the efficient rendering of 2.5d digital surface models (DSMs) and 3d point-clouds, a method for the automatic derivation of city models from raw DSMs, and an approach allowing semantic interaction with complex LOD models. The hierarchical LOD model for digital surface models is based on a quadtree of precomputed, simplified triangle mesh approximations. The rendering of the proposed model is proved to allow real-time rendering of very large and complex models with pixel-accurate details. Moreover, the necessary preprocessing is scalable and fast. For 3d point clouds, I introduce an LOD scheme based on an octree of hybrid plane-polygon representations. For each LOD, the algorithm detects planar regions in an adequately subsampled point cloud and models them as textured rectangles. The rendering of the resulting hybrid model is an order of magnitude faster than comparable point-based LOD schemes. To automatically derive a city model from a DSM, I propose a constrained mesh simplification. Apart from the geometric distance between simplified and original model, it evaluates constraints based on detected planar structures and their mutual topological relations. The resulting models are much less complex than the original DSM but still represent the characteristic building structures faithfully. Finally, I present a method to combine semantic information with complex geometric models. My approach links the semantic entities to the geometric entities on-the-fly via coarser proxy geometries which carry the semantic information. Thus, semantic information can be layered on top of complex LOD models without an explicit attribution step. All findings are supported by experimental results which demonstrate the practical applicability and efficiency of the methods

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF CANCELLOUS BONE

A variety of pathologies exist which increase the likelihood of bone fracture. Present methods for determining the fracture risk of a specific patient are based exclusively on the amount of bone present. While the quantity of bone tissue is correlated with strength, it neglects to account for bone’s intricate microarchitecture. To assess the effect of bone quality on strength, a methodology was developed for the structural analysis of cancellous bone biopsies. Thirty biopsies were selected from a pre-existing biopsy bank, and scanned using a SCANCO µCT-40 at a resolution of 30 microns. Cortical bone was removed from the resulting three-dimensional geometry, and the remaining cancellous bone was meshed with solid tetrahedral elements. A linear static uniaxial compression test was performed using ANSYS v14.0 to determine the apparent-level Young’s modulus. The maximum von Mises stress was also investigated, but showed poor convergence with increased mesh density. Consistent with the methodology of Pistoia et al., the failure load was assumed to occur when 2% of the bone volume exceeded 7000 µstrain. The results of the finite element analysis compared favorably with known values for cancellous bone strength