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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.

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.

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.

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.

It is very important to investigate how road irregularity excitation will affect the durability, reliability, and performance degradation of fuel cell vehicle powertrain and its key components, including the electric motor, power control unit, power battery package and fuel cell engine system. There are very few published literatures in this research area. In this paper, an elementary but integrated experimental work is described, including the real road load sample on proving ground, road load reproduction on vibration test rig, total vehicle road simulation test and key components vibration tests. Remote parameter control technology is adopted to reproduce the real road load on road simulator and six-degree-of-freedom vibration table, which is used respectively for total vehicle and components vibration tests.

Real-time interaction between a driver and the simulator is problematic. In this study, the racing car driving simulator has been established, which is composed of the following functional components: Motion Controller, Simview, Scenario Editor, Application Programmer Interface (APIs) and Crash Simulation. With TCP/IP protocol, the Motion Controller receives driver's manipulation, road unevenness and crash situation of Simview, then generates motion streams that reflecting the current conditions, and sends them to Simview and to the hydraulic platform. Furthermore, by detecting and analyzing general vehicle two-dimensional impact, a kind of complete and applicable calculation method has been established, and complicated vehicle impacts can be analyzed accurately. This racecar driving simulator places a racing driver in a interactive environment, and provides the driver with high-fidelity motion, visual, auditory, and force feedback cues.

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.

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.

With the development of automotive HMI and mobile internet, many interactive modes are available for drivers to fulfill the in-vehicle secondary tasks, e.g. dialing, volume adjustment, music playing. For driving safety and drivers’ high expectation for HMI, it is urgent to effectively evaluate interactive mode with good efficiency, safety and good user experience for each secondary tasks, e.g. steering wheel buttons, voice control. This study uses a static driving simulation cockpit to provide driving environment, and sets up a high-fidelity driving cockpit based on OKTAL SacnerStudio and three-dimensional modeling technology. The secondary tasks supported by HMI platform are designed by customer demands research. The secondary task test is carried out based on usability test theory, and the influence on driving safety by different interactive modes is analyzed.

Based on the emergency lane change cases extracted from the China naturalistic driving data, the driving steering behavior divides into three phases: collision avoidance, lateral movement and steering stabilization. Using the steering primitive fitting by Gaussian function, the distribution of the duration time, the relationship between steering wheel rate and deflection were analyzed in three phases. It is shown that the steering behavior essentially is composed of steering primitives during the emergency lane-change. However, the combination of the steering primitives is different according to the specific steering constraints in three phases. In the collision avoidance phase, a single steering primitive with high peak is used for the fast steering; in the lateral movement and stabilization phase, a combination of two or even more steering primitives is built to a more accurate steering.

The vehicular fuel cell stack is unavoidably impacted by the vibration in the real-world usage due to the road unevenness. However, effects of vibration on stacks have yet to be completely understood. In this work, the mechanical integrity and gas-tightness of the stack were investigated through a strengthen road vibration test with a duration of 200 h. The excitation signals applied in the vibration test were simulated by the acceleration of the stack, which were previously measured in a vehicle vibration test. The load signals of the vehicle vibration test were iterated through a road simulator from vehicle acceleration signals which were originally sampled in the proving ground. Frequency sweep test was conducted before and after the vibration test. During the vibration test, mechanical structure inspection and pressure maintaining test of the stack were conducted at regular intervals.

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to establish the vehicle yaw stability criterion based on the sideslip angle-yaw rate (β-r) phase plane method. First, nonlinear two degrees of freedom vehicle analysis model is established by adopting the Magic Formula of nonlinear tire model. Then, according to the model in the Matlab/Simulink environment, the β-r phase plane is gained. Emphatically, the effects of different driving conditions (front wheels steering angle, road adhesion coefficient and speed) on the stability boundaries of the phase plane are analyzed. Through a large number of simulation analysis, results show that there are two types of phase plane: curve stability region and diamond stability region, and the judgment method of the vehicle stability domain type under different driving conditions is solved.

X-in-the-loop (XiL) framework is a validation concept for vehicle product development, which integrates different virtual and physical components to improve the development efficiency. In order to develop and validate an extended validation method based on XiL, Tongji University in Shanghai, China and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany co- performed a feasibility study about an X-in-the-distance-loop demonstration platform. The X-in-the-distance-loop demonstration platform includes a MATLAB/Simulink software platform and geographically distributed equipment (driver simulator, driving electric motor and dynamometer test stand), which are used to conduct bidirectional experiments to test communication of powertrain data between China and Germany.

In order to improve the robustness and stability of autonomous vehicle at high speed, a path tracking approach which combines front steering and differential braking is investigated in this paper. A bicycle model with 3-DOFs is established and a linear time-varying predictive model using front steering as its control input can be derived. Based on model predictive theory, the path tracking issue using linear time-varying model predictive control can be transformed into an online quadratic programming problem with constraints. The expected front steering angle can be obtained from online moving optimization. Then the direct yawing control is adopted to treat two types of differential braking control. The first one investigates steady-state gain of yaw rate in linear 2-DOFs vehicle model, and designs a stable differential braking controller which is based on reference yaw rate.

Wheel Aerodynamics is an important part of vehicle aerodynamics. The wheels can notably influence the total aerodynamic drag, lift and ventilation drag of vehicles. In order to simulate the real on-road condition of driving cars, the moving ground and wheel rotation is of major importance in CFD. However, the wheel rotation condition is difficult to be represented exactly, so this is still a critical topic which needs to be worked on. In this paper, a study, which focuses on two types of cars: a fastback sedan and a notchback DrivAer, is conducted. Comparing three different wheel rotating simulation methods: steady Moving wall, MRF and unsteady Sliding Mesh, the effects of different methods for the numerical simulation of vehicle aerodynamics are revealed. Discrepancies of aerodynamic forces between the methods are discussed as well as the flow field, and the simulation results are also compared with published experimental data for validation.

A brake pedal stroke simulator for Electro-hydraulic Braking System (EHBS) was developed to ensure the comfort braking pedal feel for the brake-by-wire system. An EHBS with an integrated master cylinder was proposed, and a composite brake pedal stroke simulator was designed for the EHBS, which was comprised of two inline springs and a third parallel one. A normally closed solenoid valve was used to connect the master cylinder booster chamber and the stroke simulator. The suitable brake pedal stroke was achieved by three stages of these springs' compression, whereas the solenoid valve was shutdown to enable mechanical control of the service brakes when electrical faults appeared.

Durability performance prediction is a critical issue in fuel cell research. During the demonstration operation of fuel cell commercial vehicles in China, this issue has attracted more attention. In this article, the long short-term memory neural network (LSTMNN), which is an improved recurrent neural network (RNN), and the demonstration operation data are used to establish the prediction model to predict the durability performance of the fuel cell stack. Then, a model based on a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is established to be a control group. The demonstration operation data is divided into training group and validation group. The former is used to train the prediction model, and the latter is used to verify the validity and accuracy of the prediction model. The outputs of the prediction model, as the durability performance evaluation indexes of the fuel cell, are the polarization curve (current-voltage curve) and the voltage decay curve (time-voltage curve).

To overcome the shortcoming that vehicles with multiple steering modes need to switch steering modes at parking or very low speeds, a dynamic switch method of steering modes based on MOEA/D (Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition) was proposed for 4WID-4WIS (Four Wheel Independent Drive-Four Wheel Independent Steering) electric vehicle, considering the smoothness of dynamic switch, the lateral stability of the vehicle and the energy economy of tires. First of all, the vehicle model of 4WID-4WIS was established, and steering modes were introduced and analyzed. Secondly, the conditions for the dynamic switch of steering modes were designed with the goal of stability and safety. According to different constraints, the control strategy was formulated to obtain the target angle of the active wheels. Then aiming at the smoothness of the dynamic switch, the active wheel angle trajectory was constructed based on the B-spline theory.

Gesture control has been increasingly applied to automotive industry to reduce the distraction caused by in-vehicle interactions to the primary task of driving. The aim of this study is to find out if gestures can reasonably be used to control in-car devices. Since there exists a big cultural difference of gesture between different countries because of its particularity, a set of gestures which support intuitive human-machine interaction in an automotive environment is searched. The results show a gesture dictionary for a variety of on-board functions, which conforms to Chinese drivers’ driving habits. Furthermore, this paper also describes a driving simulator test to evaluate the usability of gesture from different aspects including the effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, memorability and security. Static driving simulator is considered as an excellent environment for the in-car secondary task as its high safety level, repeatability and reliability.