Search Results

To establish a fair competition between racing vehicles is not an easy task, if different types of engine are allowed to participate (within the same class). In the Motorsports world there are several Championships where the regulations leave to the project manager substantial freedom in the vehicle-engine layout definition: The 2002 World Offshore Class I Championship (WOCC) seems to be an excellent example, since both gasoline and diesel (naturally aspirated and turbocharged) engines are admitted to race. The paper presents a power output comparison method that could be useful both for the organizers to establish a fair competition as well as for the racing engineers to decide what's the optimal layout. Since the analysis regards the maximum power, BMEP and engine speed have to be evaluated under such condition for the engines to be compared.

This paper presents a 14 degrees of freedom vehicle model. Despite numerous software are nowadays commercially available, the model presented in this paper has been built starting from a blank sheet because the goal of the authors was to realize a model suitable for real-time simulation, compatible with the computational power of typical electronic control units, for on-board applications. In order to achieve this objective a complete vehicle dynamics simulation model has been developed in Matlab/Simulink environment: having a complete knowledge of the model's structure, it is possible to adapt its complexity to the computational power of the hardware used to run the simulation, a crucial feature to achieve real-time execution in actual ECUs.

This paper presents an original procedure for misfire detection in a high-performance 12-cylinder engine, based on the analysis of the time periods between subsequent combustions. A detailed analysis of the misfire effects on the engine crank-shaft instantaneous speed is presented, then a misfire detection procedure is designed, based on the misfire pattern recognition. The capability of this methodology was then validated under the worst case condition of a random misfire in several tests performed with the vehicle running on a circular race-track, at low and high load, in different gear, under acceleration and during a normal urban cycle. The results obtained are very interesting because the misfire pattern recognition works well even during cut-off or gear shifts, avoiding false alarm due to the strong influence that these phenomena have on crank-shaft dynamics.