Internal combustion engines and transport machinery have been the subject of interest and the research focus since the very beginning of the Faculty. The area of research and other expert activities of the Department’s three chairs are internal combustion engines, road motor vehicles, railway vehicles, and internal and external transport and handling systems. The Department’s range of activities includes teaching, research and collaboration with industry, activities that are closely intertwined and difficult to separate. The Department teachers give lectures in the sub-specialization Engines and Vehicles, modules taught in the third year of the undergraduate and mainly in the graduate study. A considerable number of students of other sub-specializations or study programmes also attend lectures given by the Department’s staff, including modules on internal combustion engines, engine design, motor vehicles, railway vehicles, rail vehicle design, hydraulic drives, mechanical handling equipment and optimization of constructions.

Research within this Department focuses on the areas of interest of individual chairs. The areas of research that are of special interest to the Chair of IC Engines and Motor Vehicles involve the development of numerical modelling of combustion processes in the internal combustion engineand the appropriate (sub)models of a variety of phenomena within the internal combustion engine. In recent years, a great deal of effort has been devoted to the equipping of the IC Engine and Motor Vehicle Laboratory aiming to enable experimental tests and numerical modelling, and collectdata on different processes and phenomena, thus supporting research to further improve numerical models. The results of these activities are also linked to the projects and collaboration with several world leading universitiesand companies such as UC Berkeley, USA and AVL GmbH, Graz, Austria. The IC Engine and Motor Vehicle Laboratory also deals with the standardization of motor vehicles including testing of vehicles or their components respectively. Special attention has been given to the environmentally unfriendly aspects of motor vehicles; in particular the internalcombustion engines emissions in road motor vehicles, but also emissions from stationary plants as well as from non-road mobile machinery.

The Chair of Mechanical Handling Equipment and Steel Structures works on a number of activities among which are the development of new design solutions for transport equipment and their systematic research. As a member of the Interdisciplinary Team (ACG Group), the Chair has successfully participated in the international research projects on automotive industry mechatronic systems such as the development of magnetorheological clutches and the application of servo wet clutches (active differentials)and dry friction clutches (dual clutches) in cooperation with Ford Motor Co., Dearborn, MI, USA.

Close collaboration with industry partners involves the development of new structures, preparing studies, reports and expertises as well as monitoring and special technical inspections.Since one of the directions of the EU transport system development is based on the railway traffic, in addition to dealing with intercity passenger and freight traffic the Chair of Railway Vehicles is concerned with the suburbanand urban traffic. Within the Railway Vehicles module students are taught the fundamentals of rail vehicles, while in the Rail Vehicle Design module the issues of designing and calculating of rail vehicle vital parts are addressed. The future of the development of high-speed railway and magnetic levitation systems, or maglev, is the focus of the Levitated Vehicles module.

Since October 2017, the IC Engine and Motor Vehicle Laboratory has been implementing the project National Reference Laboratory for Emissions from IC Engines for Non-Road Mobile Machinery. This is the first FAMENA project that has been awarded the European Structural and InvestmentFunds grant. The total value of the project amounts to HRK 57,000,000.00 and makes it the most valuable project contracted by FAMENA so far.Chairs

Chair of IC Engines and Motor Vehicleswww.fsb.unizg.hr/miv/
Chair of Mechanical Handling Equipment and Steel Structureswww.fsb.unizg.hr/transportni/
Chair of Railway Vehicleswww.fsb.unizg.hr/ktlpv

Laboratories

MM IC Engine and Motor Vehicle Laboratory, www.fsb.unizg.hr/lmv/
MM Laboratory for Mechanical Handling Equipment and Steel Structures

Some distinctive facts

The key role in the teaching activities within the sub-specialization IC Engines and Motor Vehicles
Croatian Society for Engines and Vehicles
State-of-the-art software for the calculation of IC engine and motor vehicles dynamics
Vehicle conformity certification
Testing of vehicle components
A number of projects in close collaboration with industry
Vehicle conversion projects
Formula Student team head office