Vehicle design engineers intuitively know that an unplanned mass increase in a component during vehicle design has a ripple effect throughout the vehicle; subsystems need to be resized to function with this additional mass. These secondary mass changes can be significant, and it is important to consider them during the mass budgeting process. This is because important vehicle metrics, such as fuel consumption and greenhouse gas assessments, depend upon vehicle mass.
This paper, written in collaboration between experts at the University of Michigan and RWTH Aachen University, focuses on means to estimate influence coefficients. Click to download the paper >>