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The adhesion control is the basic technology of active safety for the four-wheel driven EV. In this paper, a novel adhesion control method based on fuzzy logic control is proposed. The control system can maximize the adhesion force without road condition information and vehicle speed signal. Also, the regulation torque to prevent wheel slip is smooth and the vehicle driving comfort is greatly improved. For implementation, only the rotating speed of the driving wheel and the motor driving torque signals are needed, while the derived information of the wheel acceleration and the skid status are used. The simulation and road test results have shown that the adhesion control method is effective for preventing slip and lock on the slippery road condition.

Fatigue behavior of aluminum alloys under multiaxial loading was investigated with both cast aluminum A356-T6 and wrought alloy 6063-T6. The dominant multiaxial fatigue crack preferentially nucleates from flaws like porosity and oxide films located near the free surface of the material. In the absence of the flaws, the cracking/debonding of the second phase particles dominates the crack initiation and propagation. The number of cracked/debonded particles increases with the number of cycles, but the damage rate depends on loading paths. Among various loading paths studied, the circle loading path shows the shortest fatigue life due to the development of complex dislocation substructures and severe stress concentration near grain/cell boundaries and second phase particles.

A passive thermal management system (TMS) using composite phase change material (PCM) for large-capacity, rectangular lithium-ion batteries is designed. A battery module consisting of six Li-ion cells connected in series was investigated as a basic unit. The passive TMS for the module has three configurations according to the contact area between cells and the composite PCM, i.e., surrounding, front-contacted and side-contacted schemes. Firstly, heat generation rate of the battery cell was calculated using the Bernardi equation based on experimentally measured heat source terms (i.e. the internal resistance and the entropy coefficient). Physical and thermal properties such as density, phase change temperature, latent heat and thermal conductivity of the composite PCM were also obtained by experimental methods. Thereafter, thermal response of the battery modules with the three TMS configurations was simulated using 3D finite element analysis (FEA) modeling in ANSYS Fluent.

The noise and vibration of electric vacuum pump (EVP) become a major problem for electric vehicles when the vehicle is stationary. This paper aims at the EVP’s abnormal noise of an electric vehicle when stationary. Driver’s right ear (DRE) noise was tested and spectrogram analysis was carried out to identify the noise sources. In order to attenuate this kind of abnormal noise, a new EVP rubber mount with a segmented structure was introduced, which optimized the transfer path of vibration. Then dynamic stiffness and fatigue life of the EVP mount with different rubber hardness were calculated through finite element analysis (FEA) approach. Bench tests of fatigue life and DRE noise were performed to validate the FEA results. Test data of the sample mount shows that sound pressure level of DRE was dramatically attenuated and thus passengers’ ride comfort was enhanced.

A compiled method of the programmed load spectrum, which can simplify and accelerate the fatigue bench test of a car body, is proposed and its effectiveness is checked by the fatigue simulation. By using the multi-body dynamics model with a satisfactory accuracy, the virtual iteration is applied to cascade body loads from the wheel hubs. Based on the rain-flow counting method and statistics theory, the distributions of the body loads are analyzed, and then the programmed load spectrum is compiled and simplified. Through comparative study, the simulation results of random and programmed load spectrum are found to agree well with each other in terms of the damage distribution and fatigue life, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented method.

With the rapidly developing automotive industry and stricter environmental protection laws and regulations, lightweight materials, advanced manufacturing processes and structural optimization methods are widely used in body design. Therefore, in order to evaluate and improve the pedestrian protection during a collision, this paper presents an impact simulation modeling and structural optimization method for a sport utility vehicle engine hood made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP). Head injury criterion (HIC) was used to evaluate the performance of the hood in this regard. The inner panel and the outer panel of CFRP hood were discretized by shell elements in LS_DYNA. The Mat54-55 card was used to define the mechanical properties of the CFRP hood. In order to reduce the computational costs, just the parts contacted with the hood were modeled. The simulations were done in the prescribed 30 impact points.

Water and thermal management is an essential issue that influences performance and durability of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Water content in membrane decides its ionic conductivity and membrane swelling favors the ionic conductivity, resulting in decreases in the membrane’s ohmic resistance and improvement in the output voltage. However, if excessive liquid water can’t be removed out of cell quickly, it will fill in the pores of catalyst layer (CL) and gas diffusion layer (GDL) then flooding may occur. It is essential to keep the water content in membrane at a proper level. In this work, a transient isothermal one-dimensional model is developed to investigate effects of the relative humidity of inlet gas and cell temperature on performance of a PEMFC.

The thermophysical parameters and amount of composite phase change materials (PCMs) have decisive influence on the thermal control effects of thermal management systems (TMSs). At the same time, the various thermophysical parameters of the composite PCM are interrelated. For example, increasing the thermal conductivity is bound to mean a decrease in the latent heat of phase change, so a balance needs to be achieved between these parameters. In this paper, a prismatic LiFePO4 battery cell cooled by composite PCM is comprehensively analyzed by changing the phase change temperature, thermal conductivity and amount of composite PCM. The influence of the composite PCM parameters on the cooling and temperature homogenization effect of the TMS is analyzed. which can give useful guide to the preparation of composite PCMs and design of the heat transfer enhancement methods for TMSs.

Hot forming process of ultrahigh strength boron steel 22MnB5 is widely applied in vehicle industry. It is one of the most effective approaches for vehicle light weighting. Dynamic recovery is the major softening mechanism of the boron steel under austenite state at elevated temperatures. Deformation mechanism of the boron steel can be revealed by investigation on the behavior of dynamic recovery, which could also improve the accuracy of forming simulations for hot stamping. Uniaxial tensile experiments of the boron steel are carried out on the thermo-mechanical simulator Gleeble3800 at elevated temperatures. The true stress-strain curves and the relations between the work hardening rate and flow stress are obtained in different deformation conditions. The work hardening rate decreases linearly with increasing the flow stress.

There are a large number of uncertainties in engineering design, and the accumulated uncertainties will enlarge the overall failure probability of the structure system. Therefore, structural design considering uncertainties has good guiding significance for improving the reliability of engineering structures. To address this issue, the dynamic-static structural topology optimization is established and reliability-based topology optimization with decoupling format is conducted in this study. The design point which satisfying the constraint of the target reliability indicator is obtained according to the reliability indicators of the first-order reliability method, and the uncertain design variables are modified into a deterministic variable according to the sensitivity information.

Thin-walled structures have been widely used in automobile body design because of its good lightweight and superior mechanical properties. For the energy-absorbing box of the automobile, it is necessary to consider its working conditions under the axial and oblique impact. In this paper, a novel hierarchical honeycomb is proposed and used as filler for thin-walled structures. Meanwhile, the crashworthiness performances of the conventional honeycomb-filled and the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structures under different impact conditions are systematically studied. The results indicate the energy absorption of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure is higher than that of the conventional honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure, and the impact angle has significant effects on the energy absorption performance of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled structure.

The action of load on the component is crucial to evaluate the performance of durability. Another factor that affects fatigue life is the boundary conditions of the test specimen being tested by introducing unrealistic loads on the component of interest. The physical test is widely conducted in the laboratory. The fixture provides additional constraints on the test specimen as well as reaction forces to balance the test system [1]. The characteristics of the fixture involved in the test is important to analyze and assess the test results [2]. The impact of the reaction force of the fixture on the spindle-coupled axle road simulation test is presented in this article. A simplified 7-DoF (degrees of freedom) model is introduced to demonstrate the dynamic behavior of the vehicle. The influence on the internal load by the fixture has been analyzed. Followed by a more detailed MBS (multibodysystem) model to give a thorough understanding of the phenomenon.

For an electric vehicle driven by four in-wheel motors, the torque of each wheel can be controlled precisely and independently. A closed-loop control method of differential drive assisted steering (DDAS) has been proposed to improve vehicle steering properties based on those advantages. With consideration of acceleration requirement, a three dimensional characteristic curve that indicates the relation between torque and angle of the steering wheel at different vehicle speeds was designed as a basis of the control system. In order to deal with the saturation of motor's output torque under certain conditions, an anti-windup PI control algorithm was designed. Simulations and vehicle tests, including pivot steering test, lemniscate test and central steering test were carried out to verify the performance of the DDAS in steering portability and road feeling.

The prevention and control of brake judder and its various negative effects has been a key target of vehicle production. One of the effects is the steering wheel vibration during vehicle braking. Experimental and theoretical investigation into “steering wheel vibration due to brake judder” is extensively presented in this paper. The vehicle road test is carried out under controlled braking conditions. During the test, the accelerations of brake caliper assembly, suspension low and upper control arm, steering arm, tie rod and steering wheel, left and right wheel rotary speed, are measured by a multi-channel data acquisition system. The data processing focuses on order tracking analysis and transfer path analysis to work out the related resonant components. A disc brake assembly, with deliberately designed disc thickness variation and surface run-out combinations, is tested on a brake dynamometer.

This paper describes a methodology to estimate yaw rate of a 4-wheel-drive electric vehicle, in which wheel driven torque can be independently controlled by electric motor. Without non-driven wheels it would be difficult to estimate the vehicle yaw rate precisely, especially when some of the four wheels have large slip ratio. Therefore, a model based estimation methodology is put forward, which uses four wheel speeds, steering wheel angle and vehicle lateral acceleration as input signals. Firstly the yaw rate is estimated through three different ways considering both vehicle kinematics and vehicle dynamics. Vehicle kinematics based method has good estimation accuracy even when the vehicle has large lateral acceleration. However, it can not provide satisfying results when the wheel has large slip ratio. In contrast, vehicle dynamics based method is not so sensitive to wheel slip ratio.

The frame of a low-speed electric vehicle was treated as the research object in the paper. The fatigue load of the frame was analyzed with multi-body dynamics method and the fatigue life of frame was analyzed with the nominal stress method. Firstly, the multi-body dynamics model of the vehicle was established and the multi-body dynamics simulation was carried out to simulate the condition where the vehicle used to travel. The fatigue load history of the frame was obtained from the simulation. Secondly, the amplitude-frequency characteristic of the fatigue load was analyzed. The frequency of the fatigue load mainly focused on 0~20HZ from the analysis. Thirdly, the modal of frame was analyzed. As the frequency of the fatigue load was less than the natural frequency of the frame, the quasi-static method was selected to calculate the stress history of the frame. Next, the fatigue life of the frame was analyzed based on S-N curve.

The multi-body dynamics simulation and physical iteration were carried out based on the 4-channel road simulation bench, the solution of fatigue test bench which was suitable for cab with frame and suspension was designed. Large load and displacement above the suspension can be loaded on the test bench, and the same weak position of cab exposed on the road test can be assessed well on the fatigue test bench. The effectiveness of the bench test solution was verified though comparative study. And it has important reference for the same type of cab assembly with suspension in the fatigue bench test. According to the durability specifications of cab assembly, a multi-body dynamics model with a satisfactory accuracy was built. And the fixture check and virtual iteration analysis were used to verify the effectiveness of the solution. According to the road load signal analysis and multi-body dynamics analysis results, the test bench with linear guide and spherical joint was built.

Biomechanics and biodynamics are increasingly focused on the automotive industry to provide comfortable driving environment, reduce driver fatigue, and improve passenger safety. Man-centered conception is a growing emphasis on the open design of automobile. During the long-term driving, occupational drivers are easily exposed to the neck pain, so it is important to reduce the muscle force load and its fatigue, which are not usually considered quantitatively during traditional ergonomics design, so standards related are not well developed to guide the vehicle design; On the other hand, the head-neck models are always built based on the statics theory, these are not sufficient to predict the instantaneous variation of the muscle force. In this paper, a head-neck model with multi DOFs is created based on multibody dynamics. Firstly, a driver-vehicle-road model considering driver multi-rigid body model, vehicle subsystems, and different ranks of pavement is built.

To solve the problem of serious roller wear and improve the smoothness of the sliding door motion process, the rigid-flexible coupling multi-body model of the vehicle sliding door was built in ADAMS. Force boundary conditions of the model were determined to meet the speed requirement of monitoring point and time requirement of door opening-closing process according to the bench test specification. The results of dynamic simulation agreed well with that of test so the practicability and credibility of the model was verified. In the optimization of the ride comfort of the sliding door, two different schemes were proposed. The one was to optimize the position of hinge pivots and the other was to optimize the structural parameters of the middle guide. The impact load of lead roller on middle guide, the curvature of the motion trajectory and angular acceleration of the sliding door centroid were taken as optimization objectives.

As is known to all, the structure of the chassis has been greatly simplified as the application of in-wheel motor in electric vehicle (EV) and distributed control is allowed. The micro EV can alleviate traffic jams, reduce the demand for motor and battery capacity due to its small size and light weight and accordingly solve the problem that in-wheel motor is limited by inner space of the wheel hub. As a result, this type of micro EV is easier to be recognized by the market. In the micro EV above, two seats are side by side and the battery is placed in the middle of the chassis. Besides, in-wheel motors are mounted on the rear axle and only front axle retains traditional hydraulic braking system. Based on this driving/braking system, distribution of braking torque, system reliability and braking intensity is analyzed in this paper.