Search Results

In this study, an Electro-pneumatic shifting system (E.P.S) has been designed to install on manual transmissions to make the selecting and shifting process faster and more reliable compared to manual systems. Shifting mechanism of a six speed gear box has been improved by using two tandem pneumatic cylinders, position sensors, pneumatic valves, and a controlling board based on AVR microcontroller. The central processing unit uses an electronic control system to provide the optimized operation of shift mechanism. This system can be easily adjusted in order to install externally on manual transmission systems without any changes on housing and transmission shift links.

This paper presents a simulation model for the analysis of internal gear ring pumps. The model follows a multi domain simulation approach comprising sub-models for parametric geometry generation, fluid dynamic simulation, numerical calculation of characteristic geometry data and CAD/FEM integration. The sub-models are interacting in different domains and relevant design and simulation parameters are accessible in a central, easy to handle graphical user interface. The potentials of the described tool are represented by simulation results for both steady state and transient pump operating conditions and by their correlation with measured data. Although the presented approach is suitable to all applications of gear ring pumps, a particular focus is given to hydraulic actuation systems used in automotive drivetrain applications.

This paper describes the numerical modeling of the hydraulic circuit of a self-moving boom lift. Boom lifts consist of several hydraulic actuators, each of them performs a specific movement. Hydraulic systems for lifting applications must ensure consistent performance no matter what the load and how many users are in operation at the same time. Common solutions comprise a fixed or a variable displacement pump with load-sensing control strategy. Instead, the hydraulic circuit studied in this paper includes a fixed displacement pump and an innovative (patented) proportional valve assembly. Each proportional valve (one for each user) permits a flow regulation for all typical load conditions and movement simultaneously. The study of the hydraulic system required a detailed modeling of some components such as: the overcenter valves, for the control of the assistive loads; the proportional valve, which keeps a constant flow independently of pressure drop across itself.

A low-cost hydrostatic absorption dynamometer has been developed for small to medium sized engines. The dynamometer was designed and built by students to support student projects and educational activities. The availability of such a dynamometer permits engine break-in cycles, performance testing, and laboratory instruction in the areas of engines, fuels, sensors, and data acquisition. The dynamometer, capable of loading engines up to 60kW at 155Nm and 3600rpm, incorporates a two-section gear pump and an electronically operated proportional pressure control valve to develop and control the load. A bypass valve permits the use of only one pump section, allowing increased fidelity of load control at lower torque levels. Torque is measured directly on the drive shaft with a strain gage. Torque and speed signals are transmitted by an inductively-powered collar mounted to the dynamometer drive shaft. Pressure transducers at the pump inlet and pump outlet allow secondary load measurement.

This paper presents hydraulic topographies using a network of valves to achieve better energy efficiency, reliability, and performance. The Topography with Integrated Energy Recovery (TIER) system allows the valves and actuators to reconfigure so that flow from assistive loads on actuators can be used to move actuators with resistive loads. Many variations are possible, including using multiple valves with either a single pump/motor or with multiple pump/motors. When multiple pump/motors are used, units of different displacements can be chosen such that units are controlled to minimize time operating at low displacement, thus increasing overall system efficiency. Other variations include configurations allowing open loop or closed loop pump/motors to be used, the use of fixed displacement pump/motors, or the ability to store energy in an accumulator. This paper gives a system level overview and summarizes the hydraulic systems using the TIER approach.

The Indiana Space Grant Consortium is one of 52 members of the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program (“Space Grant”), which was initiated by NASA in 1988. Space Grant is designed to be a source of NASA-related information, awards, and programs to enhance education, outreach, and workforce development for the United States. Based on the land grant model of public university education, Space Grant seeks to spread the vision of NASA to increase science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) awareness; NASA-related education; workforce development; outreach and research activities. This paper describes the evolution of these activities in Indiana.

The need for greater capacity in automotive transportation (in the midst of constrained resources) and the convergence of key technologies from multiple domains may eventually produce the emergence of a “swarm” concept of operations. The swarm, a collection of vehicles traveling at high speeds and in close proximity, will require management techniques to ensure safe, efficient, and reliable vehicle interactions. We propose a shared-autonomy approach in which the strengths of both human drivers and machines are employed in concert for this management. A fuzzy logic-based control implementation is combined with a genetic algorithm to select the shared-autonomy architecture and sensor capabilities that optimize swarm operations.

Conventional hydraulic steering systems keep improving performance and driving comfort by introducing advanced features via mechanical design. The ever increasing mechanical complexity requires the advanced modeling and simulation technology to mitigate the risks in the early stage of the development process. In this paper, we focus on advanced modeling tools environment with an example of a load sensing hydraulic steering system. The complete system architecture is presented. Analytical equations are developed for a priority valve and a steering control unit as the foundation of modeling. The full version of hydraulic steering system model is developed in Dymola platform. In order to capture interaction between steering and vehicle, the co-simulation platform between the hydraulic steering system and vehicle dynamics is established by integrating Dymola, Carsim and Simulink.

The objective of this work is to demonstrate the influence of line length concerning noise source generation using a coupled pump-motor-line model predicting superimposed pulsations of a hydrostatic transmission. This transmission model predicts superimposed flow pulsations throughout the connecting lines as well as oscillating forces dependant on system pressure variances; such oscillations are the primary sources of noise in hydrostatic transmissions which are known as FBN and SBN (Fluid Borne Noise and Structure Borne Noise), respectively. This study is a part of novel research where the prediction of superimposed noise sources considering interrelating dynamics of the pump/motor and connecting lines is accomplished and can potentially be used to develop noise source reduction strategies. An investigation considering the influence of line length demonstrates the potential to further reduce noise source generation in hydrostatic transmissions.

Noise generation in axial piston machines can be attributed to two main sources; fluid borne and structure borne. Any attempt towards noise reduction in axial piston machines should focus on simultaneous reduction of these two sources. A multi-parameter multi-objective optimization approach to design valve plates to reduce both sources of noise for pumps which operate in a wide range of operating conditions has been detailed in a previous work (Seeniraj and Ivantysynova, 2008). The focus of this paper is to explain the background and to demonstrate the functionality and usefulness of the methodology for pump design.

The following computational study examines the structure of sonic hydrogen jets using inlet conditions similar to those encountered in direct-injection hydrogen engines. Cases utilizing the same mass and momentum flux while varying exit-to-chamber pressure ratios have been investigated in a constant-volume computational domain. Furthermore, subsonic versus sonic structures have been compared using both hydrogen and ethylene fuel jets. Finally, the accuracy of scaling arguments to characterize an underexpanded jet by a subsonic “equivalent jet” has been assessed. It is shown that far downstream of the expansion region, the overall jet structure conforms to expectations for self-similarity in the far-field of subsonic jets. In the near-field, variations in fuel inlet-to-chamber pressure ratios are shown to influence the mixing properties of sonic hydrogen jets. In general, higher pressure ratios result in longer shock barrel length, though numerical resolution requirements increase.

In long-duration, closed human habitats in space that include crop growth, one challenge that is faced while designing a candidate waste processor is the composition of solid-waste loads, which include human waste, packaging and food-processing materials, crop spoilage, and plant residues. In this work, a new modeling tool is developed to characterize crop residues and food wastes based on diet in order to support the design of solid-waste technologies for closed systems. The model predicts amounts of crop residues and food wastes due to food processing, crop harvests, and edible spoilage. To support the design of solid-waste technologies, the generation of crop residues and food wastes was characterized for a 600-day mission to Mars using integrated menu, crop, and waste models. The three sources of plant residues and food waste are identified to be food processors, crop harvests, and edible spoilage.

The four-microphone standing wave tube system has proven useful for measuring the absorption and transmission loss of various fibrous and non-fibrous absorbers. The system is fast, repeatable, accurate and compact. This paper discusses the advantages of the four-microphone system for measuring the transmission loss in lateral-flow absorber systems. The original four-microphone round impedance tube system and the migration to a four-microphone square tube system are discussed. The four-microphone square tube system allows effective study of filled and partially filled cavities.

The firing frequency components of the dynamic diesel particulate filter pressure signals carry significant information about the particulate load. Specifically, the normalized magnitude and relative phase of the firing frequency components exhibit clear dependence on the particulate load in a filter. Further, the test-to-test variation and back-to-back repeatability in this work was better for the dynamic pressure signal features than for the mean value pressure drop. This work provides a promising extension or alternative to the mean value pressure drop correlation to particulate load through Darcy's Law. The results may be particularly useful for filter monitoring and control.

A fast time-scale 1-D dynamic diesel particulate filter model capable of resolving the pressure pulsations due to individual cylinder firing events is presented. The purpose of this model is to investigate changes in the firing frequency component of the pulsating exhaust flow at different particulate loadings. Experimental validation data and simulation results clearly show that the magnitude and phase of the firing frequency components are directly correlated to the mass of particulate stored in a diesel particulate filter. This dynamic pressure signal information may prove particularly useful for monitoring particulate load during vehicle operation.

This paper presents a method for indirect measurement of tire slip angles from chassis acceleration, yaw rate, and steer angle measurements. The chassis is assumed to be rigid so that acceleration data can be integrated to estimate velocities of the front and rear of the vehicle, from which slip angles can be predicted. The difference in front and rear slip angles is indicative of vehicle oversteer/understeer. Understeer data can then be correlated with position on the track to better understand vehicle handling behavior, aiding the tuning process. The technique is presented, and shown to work well with simulated data, even when the data is corrupted with up to 20% noise. Therefore, the inversion process presented here is theoretically sound. However, when the technique is applied to measured data from race cars, it is shown to be inaccurate. One suspected problem is the difficulty of getting accurate yaw rate data.

An experimental apparatus and a numerical model have been designed and developed to examine the lubrication condition and frictional losses at the piston and cylinder interface. The experimental apparatus utilizes components from a single cylinder, ten horsepower engine in a novel suspended liner arrangement. The test rig has been specifically designed to reduce the number of operating variables while utilizing actual components and geometry. A mixed lubrication model for the complete ring-pack and piston skirt was developed to correlate with experimental measurements and provide further insight into the sources of frictional losses. The results demonstrate the effects of speed and viscosity on the overall friction losses at the piston and cylinder liner interface. Comparisons between the experimental and analytical results show good agreement.

A temperature estimation algorithm (thermal observer) that provides accurate estimates of the thermal states of an electric machine in real time is presented. The thermal observer is designed to be a Kalman filter that combines thermal state predictions from a lumped-parameter thermal model of the electric machine with temperature measurements from a single external temperature sensor. An analysis based on the error covariance matrix of the Kalman filter is presented to guide the selection of the best sensor location. The thermal observer performance is demonstrated using a 3.8 kW permanent-magnet machine. Comparison of the thermal observer estimates and the actual temperatures demonstrate that this approach can provide accurate knowledge of the machine's thermal states despite modeling uncertainty and unknown initial machine thermal states.

The optimal design of hybrid-electric vehicle power systems poses a challenge to the system analyst, who is presented with a host of parameters to fine-tune, along with stringent performance criteria and multiple design objectives to meet. Herein, a methodology is presented to transform such a design task into a constrained multi-objective optimization problem, which is solved using a distributed evolutionary algorithm. A power system model representative of a series hybrid-electric vehicle is considered as a paradigm to support the illustration of the proposed methodology, with particular emphasis on the power system's time-domain performance.

The On-line Project Information System (OPIS) is a LAMP-based (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system being developed at NASA Ames Research Center to improve Agency information transfer and data availability, largely for improvement of system analysis and engineering. The tool will enable users to investigate NASA technology development efforts, connect with experts, and access technology development data. OPIS is currently being developed for NASA's Exploration Life Support (ELS) Project. Within OPIS, NASA ELS Managers assign projects to Principal Investigators (PI), track responsible individuals and institutions, and designate reporting assignments. Each PI populates a “Project Page” with a project overview, team member information, files, citations, and images. PI's may also delegate on-line report viewing and editing privileges to specific team members. Users can browse or search for project and member information.