Gear Shift Efforts Analysis and User Interface Software Development

Abstract

Nowadays, with the increasing demand of comfort on passenger cars, many car manufacturer companies focus on manual transmission and external control system. There are many gearshift control mechanisms available such as rod mechanism, hydraulics mechanism and cable mechanism in the current technics that need to be designed resplendently. In the meantime, base manual transmission has a lot of components such as synchronizer, gear cones, friction plates, poppet balls, hubs and rods which affect gear shift comfort. All these main components should be designed and optimized for customer satisfaction. In order to measure gear shift efforts and comfort, Gear Shift Quality Analysis (GSQA) device is developed by Ricardo Company. Using this GSQA device, gear shift force, gear shift integral, free plays, cross gate positions, fore-aft positions, shifter angles are able to be measured objectively. To collect all these attributes data, engineers should spend minimum one day on a selected vehicle. This means loss of work and money for the car manufacturers. The gear shift effort software (GSEA) for a manual transmission and external control mechanism are developed to evaluate/calculate shift and select mechanical ratio, cable strokes, length lever and shift force to provide desirable shifting quality. In addition to software calculation, the vehicle is tested using gear shift quality device. At the end of this study input parameters are discussed in terms of outputs of vehicle shift quality attributes. The results of simulation software are plotted to present easy understanding for the last user.