Automobile Hub Research Articles

Enhanced Wear and Corrosion Resistance of AZ91 Magnesium Alloy via Adherent Si-DLC Coating with Si-Interlayer: Impact of Biasing Voltage

Magnesium alloys are the lowest-density structural metals with a wide range of applications, such as aircraft skins, engine casings and automobile hubs. However, its low surface hardness and non-corrosion resistance in natural environments limit its wide range of applications. In this work, Si-DLC coatings (Si: 15 at.%) are fabricated on AZ91 alloy using a hollow cathode discharge combined with a DC bias voltage from 0 to −300 V to increase the deposition rate and modulate the structure and properties of the coatings. The Si interlayer with a thickness of around 0.6 µm is deposited first to enhance the adhesion. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Raman spectroscopy are used to investigate the effect of DC bias on the microstructure evolution of Si-DLC coatings. Meanwhile, corrosion and wear resistance of the coatings at various bias voltages have been investigated using electrochemical workstations and pin-on-desk wear testers. It is shown that the bias-free coating has a loose structure and is less resistant to corrosion and wear. The bias coating has a compact structure, small carbon cluster size, high chloride ion corrosion resistance, and high wear resistance against Al2O3 spheres. The corrosion potential of the coating bias at −300 V is −0.98 V, the corrosion current density is 1.35 × 10−6 A·cm−2, the friction coefficient is 0.08, and the wear rate is 10−8 orders of magnitude. The formation of SiC nanocrystals and high sp3-C, as well as the formation of transfer films on the surface of their counterparts, are the main reasons for the ultra-high wear resistance of the bias coatings. The wear rate, coefficient of friction, and corrosion rate of the coating are 0.0069 times, 0.2 times, and 0.0088 times that of the AZ91 alloy, respectively. However, the bias coating has only short to medium-term protection against the magnesium alloy and no long-term protection due to cracks caused by its high internal stress.

Human health risk assessment of potentially toxic elements in soil and air particulate matter of automobile hub environments in Kumasi, Ghana

Rapid urbanization and uncontrolled industrial activities in developing countries have raised concerns about potentially toxic metal contamination of the environment. This study assessed the levels of potentially toxic elements in soil and airborne particulate matter in the Suame and Asafo areas in the Kumasi metropolis, characterized by a high concentration of auto mechanic workshops and residential settlements. X-ray fluorescence analysis and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry were used to determine the metal concentrations in the samples. The results showed high concentrations of potentially toxic elements in the soil and air samples, indicating contamination from automotive activities. Metals such as Co, Ni, Pb, and Zn were found to be present at concentrations (13.42–6101.58 mg/kg and 14.15–11.74 mg/kg for Suame and Asafo respectively) that pose potential health risks to exposed populations. Mathematical models such as pollution indices were used to assess the extent of contamination and determine the potential sources of the metals - the automotive repairs. The findings highlight the urgent need for environmental management and remediation strategies to mitigate the health risks of exposure to potentially toxic elements in the Kumasi metropolis automotive hub.

Damage detection method of automobile hub based on image texture feature

With the rapid growth in the number of motor vehicles worldwide, the general public is beginning to attach importance to the quality inspection of wheels before they leave the factory. The current wheel defect detection systems are often cumbersome to operate and have low practical performance. Therefore, this research will use dynamic image segmentation, image texture feature extraction and Back Propagation neural network classification based on wheel image defect feature analysis algorithm to achieve automatic intelligent detection of automotive wheel defects. In this study, an intelligent detection system for automotive wheel defects is also designed, and finally the performance of the detection system is tested experimentally to illustrate its practicality. The experimental results show that the proposed intelligent detection system for automotive wheel defects based on image texture features identifies defects in wheel castings with a correct rate of 96% and a false positive rate of only 2%. This illustrates that the detection system proposed in this study has a high recognition rate and can provide a useful reference for the automotive industry inspection.

Evidence of Input Sharing and Labour Pooling in an Automobile Cluster of Central India

Literature on agglomeration economies firmly establishes the trinity of Input sharing, Labour pooling, and Knowledge spillover, originally conceived by Alfred Marshal, as the foundation of any industrial agglomeration or cluster. Acknowledging the rationale of the trinity, this paper documents the pieces of evidence of Input sharing and Labour pooling in a planned automobile cluster of Pithampur, a backward region of the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. The development of the automobile cluster has transformed Pithampur from a bunch of villages to an automobile hub of central India. Knowledge spillover has been kept out of this study due to the paucity of data. These pieces of evidence are collected through primary and secondary data. It is found from the pieces of evidence of input sharing that both union and state government have played a significant role in developing industry-related infrastructures in Pithampur. The availability of supporting infrastructure, services and various fiscal incentives has helped the firms enjoy economies of scale and attracts potential investors to establish their firms in Pithampur. The evidences of labour pooling capture the dramatic changes in the demography of Pithampur in terms of population growth, sex ratio, occupational shift, migration, etc.

Fault Feature Extraction of Automobile Wheel Hub Bearing Based on RSK and RSSD

Abstract Wheel hub bearing not only bears axial load but also radial load, and then its running status directly affects the performance and safety of the automobile. In particular, complicated and variable driving conditions of the automobile are not only liable to aggravate the occurrence of mechanical fault such as localized wear, but also often cause powerful intermittent interference noise. It is difficult to extract the vibration characteristics of the transient impact and harmonic components of the wheel bearings in the event of a local fault. An extraction method of fault feature based on ration of smooth and kurtosis (RSK) index and resonance-based signal sparse de-composition (RSSD) is proposed for automobile wheel hub bearings, which aims at the minimum value of RSK index, sequentially optimizes the Q-factor of the resonance sparse decomposition, and obtains its optimal value adaptively to achieve the decomposition of low resonance components with transient impact components and high resonance components with harmonic components. The effect of the method has been verified by powerful intermittent interference simulation signals and experiment signals from local fault of wheel hub bearing with periodic dynamic radial loading.

Semantic Segmentation Network for Surface Defect Detection of Automobile Wheel Hub Fusing High-Resolution Feature and Multi-Scale Feature

Surface defect detection of an automobile wheel hub is important to the automobile industry because these defects directly affect the safety and appearance of automobiles. At present, surface defect detection networks based on convolutional neural network use many pooling layers when extracting features, reducing the spatial resolution of features and preventing the accurate detection of the boundary of defects. On the basis of DeepLab v3+, we propose a semantic segmentation network for the surface defect detection of an automobile wheel hub. To solve the gridding effect of atrous convolution, the high-resolution network (HRNet) is used as the backbone network to extract high-resolution features, and the multi-scale features extracted by the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) of DeepLab v3+ are superimposed. On the basis of the optical flow, we decouple the body and edge features of the defects to accurately detect the boundary of defects. Furthermore, in the upsampling process, a decoder can accurately obtain detection results by fusing the body, edge, and multi-scale features. We use supervised training to optimize these features. Experimental results on four defect datasets (i.e., wheels, magnetic tiles, fabrics, and welds) show that the proposed network has better F1 score, average precision, and intersection over union than SegNet, Unet, and DeepLab v3+, proving that the proposed network is effective for different defect detection scenarios.

Major application and impact after modified bituminous with Nitrile rubber and Thermoset: An analysis

India is emerging as an automobile hub and has adequate production capacity of nitrile to cater to the present demand. However with the passage of time huge waste of nitrile is likely to be created which may become a major problem for its disposal. Nitrile has certain unique properties which are suitable for the road surface viz. resistant to oil, resistant to fuels, resistant to acids, high tensile strength etc. Some research has been carried out using nitrile in bitumen and the results have been encouraging. So far research has only been carried out using Nitrile rubber with different grades of bitumen.Now thermosets namely Bakelite, Furan Resin & Epoxy Resin have been used as a partial replacement of bitumen. In this research a 81 combination of Nitrile Rubber and Thermosets (Bakelite, Furan Resin & Epoxy Resin) shall be replaced with bitumen to prepared a Modified Bituminous Mix, whose properties was studied upon.To determine the optimum bitumen content (OBC) of mixes and to predict different Marshall requirements, the Marshall test is easy, economical, and widely available: Marshall consistency, flow value, air voids, mineral aggregate voids, and bitumen filled voids 5 percent, 5.5 percent, 6 percent, 6.5 percent for each of three styles of moulds were observed under 81 thermoset variations. We observed Indirect Tensile (IDT) Strength and TSR with unconditioned and conditioned would be enhanced after equal distribution of Nitrile Rubber and Thermosets (Bakelite, Furan Resin & Epoxy Resin as filler in modified bituminous . The testresults indicated that addition of Nitrile Rubber and Thermosets (Bakelite, Furan Resin & Epoxy Resin as filler remarkably improves the engineering properties of both mixes considered.

Electric vehicle policy in Thailand: Limitations of product champions

Thailand established herself as an automobile production and export hub, partly due to industrial policy. Targeting a particular vehicle type has successfully promoted specialisation of production and exports of pickup trucks. Past success led policymakers to continue the use of this so-called production champion policy to diversify automobile production in Thailand. Analysis of subsequent generations of product champion policy show that policy was successful in terms of promoting Thailand as a production and export location but failed to establish a dominant product champion akin to pickup trucks.

Design of Vision Guidance Transferring System for Automobile Hub Manufacturing

In the era of industrial 4.0 intelligent manufacturing, improving product quality and reducing labor costs are important issues in the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry. For Automobile Hub manufacturing, first the whole design of software and hardware based on visual guidance is carried out; then, from the perspective of equipment communication and control, the communication between industrial robot and PC host computer is implemented by using Modbus RTU communication protocol, and PLC control frequency converter is selected to complete the control of transmission unit, and finally, the parameters of camera geometric model are obtained by software identification during the wheel hub to be transferred Now the camera is calibrated, so that the offset can be calculated further to adjust the robot’s attitude, and finally the whole process of visual guidance and load transfer can be completed through image recognition. The practice shows that the visual guidance design scheme has been successfully applied to the automatic production line of automobile hub, which improves the production efficiency of the factory and further reduces the cost.

Anti-corrosion properties of NiCr amorphous coatings sprayed by magnetron sputtering

ABSTRACT NiCr amorphous alloy coatings were deposited by magnetron sputtering at different sputtering current for corrosion resistance. X-ray diffraction performed that the coating was constituted of nearly amorphous phase and nanocrystalline phase. The corrosion resistance of coatings were tested by the copper accelerated acetate spray (CASS) test and in the 3.5wt% NaCl solution, respectively. Corrosion behaviours of coatings were also examined in NaCl 3.5 wt% electrolyte by electrochemical workstation. The results indicate that the self-corrosion potential of the NiCr amorphous coatings shifted to more positive potential compared to crystalline NiCr coating, which indicates that the NiCr amorphous coating has more excellent corrosion resistance, especially the coating obtained under the sputtering current of 30 A. At this time, the corrosion potential was −31 mV, and the corrosion current density was 0.13 μA cm−2, which could supply a reference for practical anti-corrosion application in pumps, ship impellers and automobile hubs.

Management of Construction & Demolition Waste In Pune City

The construction boom in Pune is leading to generation of enormous of Construction & Demolition (CDW) waste and this trend is likely to further increase in recent decades. Pune is fast paced city and is known as IT and automobile hub of county with rapid growing population. A city with dynamic construction and real estate industry reinforced by some public infrastructure project of transportation and utilities. Rapid development has led to increase in construction activities in the city leading to increases in quantities of construction and demolition waste generated in the city. In this paper, content analysis approach was adopted to analyse the information collected from previous literature, government reports and information retrieved from relevant Construction & Demolition (CDW) waste management rules. This paper focuses on quantity & source of Construction & Demolition CDW waste; also reflects current scenario of disposal and its effects. It is anticipated that the collection plan could help in management of construction & demolition waste and in reduction of illegal dumping.

Potential heavy metal pollution of soils from artisanal automobile workshops: the case of Suame Magazine, Ghana

This study has investigated the levels of heavy metal pollution in the soil at a typical automobile hub where a lot of oil waste, generated through vehicular maintenance and servicing, is spilled indiscriminately into the environment. Twenty-nine (29) soil samples were taken from eight (8) locations up to a depth of 2 m (i.e., the depth to water table) in the area and analysed for the presence of Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, Cr, Fe, Mn, and Ni. In addition, laboratory permeability and grading tests were conducted on the samples to ascertain their influence on the mobility of the heavy metals. The study results indicated that the soil in the area is well graded with coefficient of permeability in the order of 10− 3 mm/h and mostly composed of silt, sand, and gravel with little amount of clay and less than 10% organic matter content as well as a pH range of 4.04–7.74. The levels of heavy metal contamination in the soil were in the order Pb > Cd > Zn > Mn > Cu > Fe > Cr > Ni. The soil quality up to a depth of 0.6 m was found to be highly polluted with the heavy metals based on pollution load index and degree of contamination assessments. In addition, a combination of Pearson’s correlation and cluster analyses of the heavy metal associations revealed the pollution source to be anthropogenic and must, therefore, be checked due to its potential to contaminate the shallow groundwater in the area and associated health implications.

Impact test simulation and structural optimization of aluminum alloy A356.2 wheel hub

In order to improve the design efficiency of automobile hub, finite element simulation analysis is performed on the impact test of automobile hub. According to the national standard of impact test, Ansys Workbench software is used to load and constrain the explicit dynamics elastoplastic model. According to the results of impact strength analysis, the deficiency of the structure is studied, and put forward the corresponding structural optimization design. The actual test verifies the accuracy of the impact test simulation. Ansys software is used again to analyse the impact stress of the improved wheel hub to verify the rationality of the improved structure. The experimental results show that the method of dynamic analysis is practical and effective in calculating the stress and strain of automobile hub impact test. The research results provide theoretical basis and practical significance for the design and development of automotive aluminum alloy wheels.

Environmental impact assessment of magnesium alloy automobile hub based on life cycle assessment

In order to find out the impact of aluminum alloy hub replaced by the magnesium alloy hub on environment, the resource consumption, energy consumption and pollutant emission during hub production and their service life of the two types of hubs are investigated based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) theory. The results indicate that the adverse impact on environment can be effectively reduced by the application of magnesium alloy hubs. Compared with aluminum alloy hubs, the global warming potential (GWP) and human toxicity potential (HTP) are reduced by 39.6% and 24.0%, respectively. CO2 is the main pollutant in the life cycles of the two kinds of hubs, which is generated throughout the whole life cycle including the fabrication process and the service life, while the pollutants of particles mainly come from the fabrication stage. Compared with the aluminum alloy hubs, the green effect brought by magnesium alloy hubs is mainly due to the reduction of fuel consumption caused by weight loss.

A real-time visual and control system for screw holes location and shielding of automobile wheel hubs

In this paper, machine vision technique is used to solve screw holes shielding problems during spray painting in wheel hub making industry. The shape and geometric structure of automobile wheel hub are studied; the wheel hub image is captured from the assembly line; image processing method is used to recognise the holes on the wheel hub surface; the diameters, positions and some other parameters are calculated; a 2D motion control method is used to locate the central position of screw holes; a compact shielding device is developed to cover the holes by special balls. This method can be used for all types of wheel hubs, and the labour costs can be reduced. The productive process is more efficient and automatic.

Noise hazard and hearing loss in workers in automotive component manufacturing industry in Guangzhou, China

To investigate noise hazard and its influence on hearing loss in workers in the automotive component manufacturing industry. Noise level in the workplace of automotive component manufacturing enterprises was measured and hearing examination was performed for workers to analyze the features and exposure levels of noise in each process, as well as the influence on hearing loss in workers. In the manufacturing processes for different products in this industry, the manufacturing processes of automobile hub and suspension and steering systems had the highest degrees of noise hazard, with over-standard rates of 79.8% and 57.1%, respectively. In the different technical processes for automotive component manufacturing, punching and casting had the highest degrees of noise hazard, with over-standard rates of 65.0% and 50%, respectively. The workers engaged in the automotive air conditioning system had the highest rate of abnormal hearing ability (up to 3.1%). In the automotive component manufacturing industry, noise hazard exceeds the standard seriously. Although the rate of abnormal hearing is lower than the average value of the automobile manufacturing industry in China, this rate tends to increase gradually. Enough emphasis should be placed on the noise hazard in this industry.

The Design of Automobile Wheel Hub Runout Online Detection System

The intelligent online measurement relates to many subjects of optical, mechanical, electronic and computer cutting-edge technology has a very important significance to the production practice. In order to realize rapid detection of automobile wheel hub runout online, convenient access to the car wheels runout error parameters, this paper study and design of the beat error detection system of non-contact measurement technology based on laser, can be achieved online accurately automobile wheel hub runout and axial run out measurement, and products of automatic sorting through analysis of measurement results.

Automatic Recognition of Hub Classification Based on Machine Vision

Based on machine vision principle, automatic recognition system is advanced to distinguish hub classification with different types. Firstly, the dark room environment is set up to eliminate the environmental interference. Secondly, the height of automobile hub is obtained with the grating ruler, and the diameter of automobile hub is achieved through image contours analysis. Finally, hub classification is accomplished through the Hu moment analysis of hub holes. Experiments show that the system can meet the needs of recognition online for hub classification, which can improve productivity effectively, and is of great application value.

Regional trade and international production networks: The context of automobile industry in Asia

The dynamics of regional development has moved on in analysing the complex relationship in the changing international production networks (IPNs). Regional integration in these days is limited in not only the formation of regional trade agreements and free trade agreements which has emerged in facilitating the economic cooperation with the stagnation in WTO but also a complex strategic coupling of those economic factors linking the industries operating in specific regions to their counterparts orchestrating production networks on a global basis. Development of automotive industry, covering automobile vehicle and component manufacturing, is usually in the interest of policymakers in developing Asian countries. Promotion of the automotive industry can lead to the expansion of numerous complementary investments by auto parts firms, thereby laying down the basis for broad-based industrial growth. With the increased global competition and the emergence of Asia as the regional automobile hub, there is a need for understanding the industry dynamics in the context of IPNs built on this regional frame. Policy domain is conducive to maintain economic and policy environment in the entire region as well as to strengthen absorptive capability of indigenous manufacturers in regional trajectories. Thus this article tries to identify the linkages in the production networks and the trade agreements in the context of the automobile industry. The key issue is how the growing formal trade agreements influence the IPNs which had been established and working relatively perfectly in the region. This article analyses the intraregional trade in the automobile industry in Asia which is essentially empirical in design but the empirical analysis is carried out in the context of the existing literature. This article concludes with the fact that regionalism can in fact trigger the formation of the networks, thus facilitating the regional industrial growth.

G030011 光弾性法によるコーナリングフォース負荷時における自動車用ハブの応力解析([G03001]材料力学部門一般セッション(1):非破壊検査)

In this study, two analyses of stress distribution and principal stress chart in an automobile hub on cornering force were done by photoelasticity to discuss optimum structure. Experiment used a model of the automobile hub made from epoxy resin, assumption parts of a bearing and brake plate. In the experiment, load to the automobile hub were increased by the assumption parts of the bearing and some weights. Stress distribution showed that stress concentration by the cornering force became remarkable at 3 points. One was fillet in boss root, the others were bolt hole and contact department with the brake plate. On the other hand, principal stress chart showed that 3 singular points appeared near the bolt hole and the fillet in the automobile hub. At least, singular point of near the fillet was divergent type from an accident example which had occurred in 2002. At results, designing optimum automobile hub needs to discuss structure of the 3 points.