Taking Automotive Safety to a New Level

While automotive mobility continues to be on the rise worldwide, thus promoting economic growth and satisfying the growing demand for individual transportation, the cost of some 1.2 million fatalities each year is certainly not acceptable. Traffic crashes can be viewed as one of the world’s largest public health problems and advanced safety technology can help address this problem effectively.

Accordingly, rating and consumer tests on active and passive safety systems have increasingly gained in importance over the last few years. The aim of these is to provide customers with safety assessments of different vehicles of the same class by using a clear evaluation system. Clearly, manufacturers can no longer afford to ignore the attainment of rating stars as a development objective. The development of suitable structural measures, improvements to the restraint system’s equipment and optimisation of their effectiveness have contributed to enhance accident safety across all vehicle classes. Nowadays, even small vehicles can demonstrate this basic level of safety, but we must mention the fact that the results between different vehicle classes can still not be compared.

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Making Automation Safe or Automating Safety?

Automation and safety have become convergent in the auto market with quality and productivity.
This article tries to explore the challenges and the exciting times that lie ahead.
This is the question in many automation engineers’ minds. It is not arguable that a highly automated plant floor process produces higher productivity, improved quality and lower operational costs, but if human safety risks are not mitigated well in advance, serious downtime costs could be incurred not to mention human injury or death. With increasing islands of automation throughout the automotive plant floor, so is the complexity of the manufacturing process and therefore, safety needs to be an integral part of the entire process.
In the past, due to high costs of implementation and no clear understanding of the direct correlation between production safety with quality and productivity, automakers and machine builders employed only limited safety systems in critical areas.
Machine safety was primarily a group of “safety relays” to protect working personnel from injury or death. Safety relays have been and continue to be used in many applications and in many parts of the automotive world. Given the many complexities of hard-wiring ‘logic’ into these relays, it would typically take very large panels to implement a ‘fail-safe’ sequence. The next major hurdle was the large runs of hard wiring from point to point to the PLC and also to the safety relays. And, if that was not enough, if any logic had to be changed due to line changes or process variations, the hard-wiring had to be redone.
In recent years, safety standards have changed in Europe and North America to help facilitate the proliferation of safety systems down to all levels of manufacturing. This has primarily been due to safety-rated controller devices sitting on a separate bus network and eventually to Intelligent Safety Networks (or ISNs) which reside side by side with the control networks or sometimes are simply an “overlay” on the same control system.
The global standardization and harmonization (though each country has some variances) has paved the way for the development of ISNs such as ProfiSAFE, DeviceNet Safe and ASi Safety at Work. These are redundant fail-safe extensions of existing device level networks such as Profibus, DeviceNet and AS-i. There are safety extensions of other networks also including SafetyBus p. While SafetyBus p is also a safety network, the similarities end there. With SafetyBus p, the system must operate as a separate safety network using a dedicated safety PLC. Though this is a far improvement over hard wired safety relay-logic, the real benefit is the ability to integrate the safety network architecture on the same CPU as the control system running the machine or plant.
This allows the ability to integrate data traffic from all the safety devices such as safety mats, interlocks, cable-pull switches, safety light curtains, e-stops and others with standard devices such as proximity sensors, photoelectric and limit switches and others on the same network (ISN) using a single safety PLC.
Automakers such as GM, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, VW-Audi along with machine suppliers such as KUKA, Durr and others who were some of the early adopters were quick to realise that the deployment of ISNs can positively affect their profitability not to mention the total cost of ownership (TCO), return on assets (ROA) and overall equipment efficiencies (OEE). Each realised it in varying degrees and in various adaptations but the benefits were becoming increasingly ‘tangible’. Automakers were interested in reducing unscheduled “downtimes” and improvements in productivity while machine suppliers benefited from reduced programming time, wiring and commissioning and debug times. Some examples of actual savings:
• KUKA estimates labour savings of at least 30% while installation time was reduced by 25%
• In several Paint Shop expansions, BMW measured installation savings terms of weeks with little or no disruption to regular production
• Opel in several installations realised not only instant savings but tremendous flexibility to adapt and migrate from existing systems. This alone was realised in 100s of hours of hard-wired changed that were avoided with software programming
• Durr systems experienced commissioning and start-up time reduce from about 2 weeks to 36 hours

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Environmental Materials Use in the Automotive Industry

Environmental Materials Use in the Automotive Industry

The main challenges facing the automotive industry at present include:

• End-of-life Vehicle (ELV) regulations
• Restriction of hazardous materials regulations
• Requirements for greater fuel efficiency
• Emission reductions
• Improved safety
• Aesthetic design
• Cost competitiveness

Several of these are beginning to have a significant impact on the materials selection and design issues within the automotive industry. For instance, the ELV regulations will specify recovery and recycling rates at the end of a vehicle’s lifetime, the responsibility for which will rest with the producer. They will also require the use of a minimum amount of recycled material to be used in new vehicles. The hazardous materials regulations will impose further restrictions on materials use and how they can be treated at the end of their life. The requirements for improved fuel efficiency tend to drive materials usage towards reductions in vehicle weight.

The two most significant requirements for materials selection and design are becoming the need for low weight and the requirement for recyclability. Lightweighting tends to favour greater use of polymers and polymer composites, although designers with steel have responded to this via initiatives such as the Ultra Light Steel Auto Body (ULSAB) project. Weight reductions can also be achieved by the greater use of multi-material components and adhesive bonding.

Recyclability tends to favour the more traditional metallic materials (steel and aluminium), with fewer different materials used in a vehicle, in larger single components that are joined by more mechanical means. The two requirements (both with environmental protection justifications) tend to drive materials selection and design in different directions. The relative importance of these requirements, and hence the most environmentally-friendly design route, provides a very good subjective discussion point for students.

An interesting new use of materials in this sector is found with natural composites (with plant fibres such as hemp and flax replacing glass nd carbon). With suitable degradable polymer matrices, these materials can provide low weight together with recyclability via composting.

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)

The second case study also relates to forthcoming waste legislation, the WEEE directive, which will specify minimum collection and recycling rates for waste electrical and electronic equipment. In this case, the most interesting materials issues arise when this legislation is taken in conjunction with that dealing with hazardous waste, e.g. the ROHS directive. Many components within WEEE contain materials that will be designated as hazardous and will require special treatment. Examples include:

• Lead solders
• Phosphorus coated monitor and TV screens
• Mercury switches
• Batteries
• Brominated flame retardants in plastics
• Refrigerants

Consideration of these allows in-depth study of the materials issues (for instance what is the physical mechanism that requires a phosphorus coating on a TV screen), to consider alternatives that can be used in future (eg what other low melting point metal alloys could be used as solders) and also what problems they are likely to pose in waste treatment. One of the most important examples of the latter issue is that of flame retardant identification with plastics.

An estimated 30% of waste plastics from IT contain brominated flame retardants, which are to be designated as hazardous. The WEEE directive will require minimum levels of recycling of plastics from IT (expected to be about 60%). Unless the brominated flame retardants can be accurately identified and separated, it will be impossible to recycle any. At present, identification methods are yet to be proven as 100% effective, and so there is a potentially huge technical problem awaiting us. Detailed consideration of this issue is an excellent way for students to learn about polymer additive technology and chemical identification methods.

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