Abstract
As with most automotive companies, Daewoos market appeal and therefore its customer base is wide and ever changing. Modern motor vehicles are designed to have a finite life. The need to balance over-engineering the product with preventing service failures is therefore a challenge. Historically, reliance has been placed on test track durability schedules to validate a design, but many of these have evolved over decades with little appreciation of how they relate to modern-day service loads. Consequently, they tend to be over-conservative in some areas and are no longer applicable to modern minimum weight and cost designs.
The ever-increasing trend to shorten development cycles with the consequent increase in virtual prototyping means that loading spectra have to be produced earlier in the design stages. The pressure on cost reduction also means that the loading spectra used for the design have to represent real service use as accurately as possible.
To this end, Daewoo Worthing Technical Centre (DWTC) has designed and manufactured a compact, robust, micro-processor controlled data collection unit, a number of which have been placed in fleet operators vehicles. Currently they are collecting information such as road speed, engine speed, distance travelled, tri-axial road wheel inputs, and brake, clutch and door operations. The data is being analysed to give specific quantiles of customer use and this is being used to create new test schedules.
This paper discusses fleet data collection and analysis techniques employed at DWTC.