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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.Cover design: eStudio Calamar S.L., HeidelbergPrinted on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) ForewordThe global crisis the automotive industry has slipped into over the second half of 2008 has set a fierce spotlight not only on which cars are the right ones to bring to the market but also on how these cars are developed. Be it OEMs developing new models, suppliers integerating themselves deeper into the development processes of different OEMs, analysts estimating economical risks and opportunities of automotive investments, or even governments creating and evaluating scenarios for financial aid for suffering automotive companies: At the end of the day, it is absolutely indispensable to comprehensively understand the processes of automotive development -the core subject of this book.Let's face it: More than a century after Carl Benz, Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler developed and produced their first motor vehicles, the overall concept of passenger cars has not changed much. Even though components have been considerably optimized since then, motor cars in the 21st century are still driven by combustion engines that transmit their propulsive power to the road surface via gearboxes, transmission shafts and wheels, which together with springdamper units allow driving stability and ride comfort. Vehicles are still navigated by means of a steering wheel that turns the front wheels, and the required control elements are still located on a dashboard in front of the driver who operates the car sitting in a seat.However, what has changed dramatically are processes involved in vehicle development. What used to be solely the work of one brilliant engineer over several years is achieved today by a highly interlaced co-operative network of specialists coming from a variety of disciplines. The process of vehicle development has become a complex interplay of decentralized sub-processes which are steered on a relatively high level. Even though this has been the dream of automotive development managers for years, there is no such thing as a completely detailed process model. On one hand, if there were one, it would be out-of-date the day after it was completed. On the other hand, on the operational level, real vehicle development "happens" to a certain extent according to individual experience, preference, and current necessities, rather than following a meticulously detailed plan. Even at the most efficient carmakers in the world, it is, to a surprisingly high extent, an ad-hoc process. After all, automotive development is about people.It is that twofold challenge, to both technically integrate separate components to create a complete vehicle, and at the same time to orchestrate the cooperation of thousands of peo...

YourTTS brings the power of a multilingual approach to the task of zero-shot multi-speaker TTS. Our method builds upon the VITS model and adds several novel modifications for zeroshot multi-speaker and multilingual training. We achieved stateof-the-art (SOTA) results in zero-shot multi-speaker TTS and results comparable to SOTA in zero-shot voice conversion on the VCTK dataset. Additionally, our approach achieves promising results in a target language with a single-speaker dataset, opening possibilities for zero-shot multi-speaker TTS and zeroshot voice conversion systems in low-resource languages. Finally, it is possible to fine-tune the YourTTS model with less than 1 minute of speech and achieve state-of-the-art results in voice similarity and with reasonable quality. This is important to allow synthesis for speakers with a very different voice or recording characteristics from those seen during training.

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Co-consolidation is considered one effective joining method to allow novel types of integral structures to be manufactured. In this study, carbon fiber reinforced Polyether-Ether-Ketone partially consolidated tape preforms were co-consolidated with carbon fiber reinforced Polyether-Ether-Ketone organo sheets in stamp-forming process. Interlaminar bond quality of both joining partners is validated in double cantilever beam test. Results exhibit average interlaminar fracture toughness of 2.54 kJ/m 2 for stamp-forming specimen, which exceeds interlaminar fracture toughness of reference samples manufactured in autoclave being 1.79 kJ/m 2. Further examinations on specimen morphology and mechanical properties indicate distinct assignments to process characteristic cooling rates, which coincides with studies from literature. Accordingly, high cooling rates-as evident in stamp-forming process-are allocated to high toughness, low crystallinity and low bending modulus, causing high interlaminar fracture toughness. Investigations on laminate quality reveal maximum void content of 1.58%.