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Advanced combustion engines dominate all automotive applications. Future high efficiency clean combustion engines can contribute significantly to sustainable transportation. Effective ignition strategies are studied to enable lean and diluted combustion under considerably high-density mixture and strong turbulences, for improving the efficiency and emissions of future combustion engines. Continuous discharge and multi-site ignition strategies have been proved to be effective to stabilize the combustion process under lean and EGR diluted conditions. Continuous discharge strategy uses a traditional sparkplug with a single spark gap and multiple ignition coil packs. The ignition coil packs operate under a specific time offset to realize a continuous discharge process with a prolonged discharge duration. Multi-site ignition strategy also uses multiple ignition coil packs.

Biodiesel has been paid more and more attention as a renewable fuel due to some excellent properties such as renewable, high cetane number, ultralow sulfur content, no aromatic hydrocarbon, high flash point, low CO2 emission when compared with diesel. While others physical properties like high viscosity, high surface tension, big density and bad volatility would spoil the spray characteristics of biodiesel fuel, which will affect the thermal efficiency when running in diesel engine. Accompanied with constant volume vessel and high speed video camera system, a high pressure common rail system, which could provide an injection pressure of 180 MPa, is used to investigate the characteristics of jatropha curcas biodiesel, palm oil biodiesel and diesel fuel. The effects of injection pressures and ambient densities on spray characteristics of these fuels are studied.

Vehicle active collision avoidance includes collision avoidance by braking and by steering. However, both of these two methods have their limitations. Therefore, it is significant to establish the feasible region of active collision avoidance to choose the optimal way to avoid traffic accidents. This paper focuses on the steering control of an autonomous vehicle to track the planned trajectory and to perform an emergency collision avoidance maneuver. Meanwhile, the collision avoidance effect of steering control is compared with that of braking control. The path tracking controller is designed by hierarchical control structure. The upper controller includes model predictive control allocation and speed controller, and the lower is designed by weighted least-squares control allocation for torque allocation. Besides, seven order polynomial is used for path planning.

The development of the present day spark ignition (SI) engines has imposed higher demands for on-board ignition systems. Proper design of the ignition system circuit is required to achieve certain spark performances. In this paper, the authors studied the relationship between spark discharge characteristics and different inductive spark ignition circuit parameters with the help of a simplified circuit model. The circuit model catches the principle behavior of the spark discharge process. Simulation results obtained from the model were compared with experimental data for model verification. Different circuit model parameters were then tuned to study the effect of those on spark discharge current and spark energy properties. The parameters studied include the ignition coil coupling coefficient, ignition coil primary and secondary inductances, secondary circuit series resistance and spark plug gap width.

In this paper comparisons were made between the fuel economy improvement between a High Pressure loop (HP) water-cooled Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system and a Low Pressure loop (LP) water-cooled EGR system. Experiments were implemented on a 1.3-Litre turbocharged PFI gasoline engine in two pars. One was EGR rate as single operating point to compare the different effect of HP- and LP-EGR. The other was mini map from 1500rpm to 3000rpm and BMEP from 2bar to 14bar because of the relative narrow available range of HP-EGR system. In consideration of practical application of EGR system, the coolant used in this experiment was kept almost the same temperature as in real vehicles (88±3°C) instead of underground water temperature, besides a model was built to calculate constant volume ratio (CVR). The results indicated that the effect of HP-EGR was weaker than that of LP-EGR under the same EGR rate, which could be seen from change of combustion parameters.

Vehicle cybersecurity consists of internal security and external security. Dedicated security hardware will play an important role in car’s internal and external security communication. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) can serve as the security cornerstone when vehicle connects with external entity or constructs a trusted computing environment. Based on functions such as the storage of certificate, key derivation and integrity testing, we research the principle of how to construct a trusted environment in a vehicle which has telematics unit. HSM (Hardware Security Module) can help to realize the onboard cryptographic communication securely and quickly so as to protect data. For certain AURIX MCU consisting of HSM, the experiment result shows that cheaper 32-bit HSM’s AES calculating speed is 25 times of 32-bit main controller, so HSM is an effective choice to realize cybersecurity.

In the last years, in order to fit the requirements of automotive radar application under the multi-target conditions, several proposals about Continuous Waveform (CW)have been developed. The transmit signal with Multiple Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) technology was developed to analyze the target information in range domain and Doppler frequency domain simultaneously, but the MFSK waveform has lower estimation accuracy in phase measuring. A higher accuracy signal type is the chirp sequence waveform of monopulse radar, which is based on two-dimension independent frequency measuring. It can also get the range and velocity information, but might lead to ambiguities in Doppler domain. To avoid the Doppler ambiguity, a method is proposed in this paper, which uses the modified chirp sequence waveform. The carrier frequencies of the modified chirp sequence are different, which causes the Doppler frequency offset.

Given the wide adoption of touchscreens in vehicles, an interesting debate is taking place regarding the good screen size, length-width ratio and whether the usability of in-vehicle information system (IVIS) would be decreased by a larger screen, especially. Moreover, the lack of scientific evidence about the concrete impact of touch screen size on usability raises questions to practitioners. In this paper, we investigated the impact of in-vehicle touch screen size on users’ visual behavior and usability as measured using eye tracker and questionnaire. Two experiments were conducted on 30 participants. In the first experiment, participants were asked to seek same information on four different in-vehicle screens based on simulated driving environment, while eye movement was recorded for analyzing efficiency of visual behavior.

Pre-ignition may lead to an extreme knock (super-knock or mega-knock) which will impose a severe negative influence on the engine performance and service life, thus limiting the development of downsizing gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine. More and more studies reveal that the auto-ignition of lubricants is the potential source for pre-ignition. However, pre-ignition is complicated to study on the engine test bench. In this paper, a convenient test method is applied to investigate the influence of lubricants metal-additives on pre-ignition. 8 groups of lubricants are injected into a hot co-flow atmosphere which generated by a burner. A single-hole nozzle injector with a diameter of 0.2 mm at 20 MPa injection pressure is utilized for lubricants' injection and spray atomization. The ignition delays of lubricants with different additives of calcium, ZDDP (Zinc Dialkyl Dithiophosphates) and magnesium content under the hot co-flow atmosphere are recorded with a high-speed camera.

The work of this paper aimed at investigating the cyclic variations of argon power cycle engine with fuel of hydrogen at lean burn operating conditions. The engine had been modified based on a 0.402 L, single-cylinder diesel engine into spark ignition engine with a port fuel injection system. The influencing factors on the cyclic variations, such as ignition timing, engine speed and compression ratio, were tested in this study. In all tests, the throttle opened at 0%, and the excess oxygen coefficient was maintained at 2.3. The results showed that as the ignition timing retards, CoVPmax and CoV(dp/dφ)max of argon power cycle engine increased, while CoVIMEP decreased firstly and increased afterward. And there is an ignition timing to make the lowest CoVIMEP, which is not consistent with MBT.

Many studies show that under diesel engine operating conditions, SCR reductant sprays will impinge on the wall of exhaust pipes. In order to understand this impinging process of SCR reductant spray, and to analyze what factors affect it, a test bench was set up by means of high speed video camera. At atmospheric pressure, SCR spray was injected on a heated metal wall, the impacts of wall temperature, injection pressure, injection height and angle on developing characteristics of SCR reductant spray after impinging on the heated wall have been researched and analyzed. The results show that the heated wall temperature has a great impact on the spray developing process, when wall temperature is lower than 405K, after water evaporated the crystallized urea will remain on the wall to block exhaust pipes. When wall temperature is higher, the atomization and evaporation of SCR reductant spray will be better, and the hydrolysis process of urea will be faster.

Spray characteristics and spray wall-impingement events are the key factors for the direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines, affecting fuel/air mixture preparation and its combustion process. Thus, the spray characteristics of a multi-hole injector for DISI engines, such as spray tip penetration and spray cone angle were investigated in an optical chamber employing the high-speed shadow photography. Furthermore, the effects of the injection pressure, ambient pressure and piston top shape on the impinging spray development were studied in the optical chamber, when the impinging distance is 26.1 mm, corresponding to about 60 CAD ATDC. In addition, the SMD and wall film thickness of the spray impinging on the piston top were studied by means of CFD technique. The results showed that the ambient pressure had the greater effect on the changes of the spray penetration and spray cone angle than the injection pressure.

Spray behavior is regarded as one of main factors which influence engine performance, fuel consumption and emissions for diesel engine. In practice, spray characteristics from each orifice from a multi-hole nozzle are normally arranged symmetrically, while the hole-to-hole spray variation is unavoidable. This variation will cause spatial uneven distribution of spray and combustion degrade, which will be no longer inconsiderable in face of the more and more stringent emission rules. In this paper, two methods including spray macro-characteristics experiment and separated fuel mass measurement are employed to test the hole-to-hole spray variation of two six-hole symmetric VCO injectors of different brands, and experiments are operated under different conditions including different injection pressures, back pressures and injection durations.

Gasoline homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) can achieve high efficiency and extremely low NOX emissions. However, the working condition range of HCCI is limited by knock occurring during engine operation. To achieve an expanded HCCI working condition range, it is necessary to explore a method predicting knock cases accurately to avoid knock occurring. Based on a DI-HCCI engine with ethanol/gasoline mixed fuel, the knock cases under different conditions have been investigated. In-cylinder pressure signals are used to identify the knock cases and the knock oscillations are extracted with fast Fourier transform (FFT). The effects of the ethanol proportion in the fuel and air/fuel ratio on the characteristics of knock have been studied. The results have shown that the knock parameters, such as maximum frequency, start point angle and the duration, have close relationship with the knock intensity.

With increasing pressure for reduction in CO2 emissions and stricter fuel targets from road vehicles, OEMs around the globe have to electrify their vehicle range to meet increasingly challenging emission standards in recent years and new transmission technologies are gaining more attention in different main markets. The actual and future powertrain development has three major directions in order to reduce or avoid emissions in the transportation sector: Hybrid Vehicles: Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), Plug-in HEV (PHEV) Electric Vehicles (EV); Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV); Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV), Range Extender FCEV (REFCEV). This paper presents a new type Hybrid transmission which is called “DHT (Dedicated Hybrid Transmission)” technology for cost-effective HEVs and PHEVs; it permits the design of very compact automatic transmissions with an integrated high-voltage electric motor on the output side of the transmission.

To research the dynamic response of active power source of electronic hydraulic brake system, the paper proposes a restricted distribution control strategy. Building control strategy model and active power source model to simulation with Matlab/Simulink and AMEsim, and bench test is conducted on different driving cycles, which proves that the dynamic response of active power source is fit and controllable by adjusting PID parameters.

Accurate parameters of vehicle motion state are very important to the active safety of a vehicle. Currently the extended Kalman filter and unscented Kalman filter are widely used in estimation of the key state parameters, such as speed. In this situation, tire model must be used. The Magic Formula Tire Model is widely used in vehicle dynamics simulation because of its high versatility and accuracy. However, it requires a large number of parameters, which make the key state parameters of a real vehicle difficult to accurately obtain. Therefore, it is limited in real-time control of a vehicle. Firstly, the original Magic Formula Tire Model is simplified in this paper; then Jin Chi's Tire Model is introduced; thirdly, parameters of both the simplified Magic Formula and Jin Chi's Tire Model are identified using PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm. Finally, Jin Chi's Tire Model is also used in parameters identification of experimental data.

With the objective to regulate hydraulic pressure accurately by controlling high speed on-off valve (HSV), finite element models are parameterized based on measured parameters of an ABS hydraulic actuator unit (HCU). The data that reflects transient electromagnetic characteristics of HSV is selected with finite element numerical simulation. Taking full advantage of those data, accurate physical models of HSV are built with other parts of hydraulic braking system. Then a new system structure is proposed to control hydraulic pressure. Not only do simulation results show ideal control effect, but also hydraulic braking system can be controlled under arbitrary input signal. Accordingly, hydraulic braking force can achieve fine regulation. Finally, the hydraulic braking system is utilized to design antilock brake control system for four-wheel-drive electric vehicle with electro-hydraulic braking. That kind of system is established on the basis of hierarchical control structure.