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It’s not easy to start the engine in winter, especially in frigid highlands, because the low temperature increases the fuel’s viscosity, decreasing the lubricating oil flow ability and the storage performance of battery. Current electrical heating method can improve the engine starting performance in low temperature condition, but this method adds an external power to the engine, leading to the engine cannot maintain an efficient energy utilization. A warming device using the solar energy is designed to conserve the energy during the daytime, and directly warm up the engine at the time when the engine turns off for a long time, especially during the night. A solar collector installed on the top of the vehicle is used to convert the solar energy to the thermal energy, which is then transferred to the heat accumulator that contain the phase-change medium which can increase the heat storage performance.

In order to ensure driving safety, heavy vehicles are often equipped with hydraulic retarder, which provides sustained, stable braking torque and converts the vehicle kinetic energy into heat taken away by the cooling system when traveling on a long downhill. The conventional hydraulic retarder braking torque is modulated by adjusting the liquid filling rate, which leads to slow response and difficult control. In this paper, a new kind of magnetorheological (MR) fluid hydraulic retarder is designed by replacing the traditional transmission oil with MR fluid and arranging the excitation coils outside the working chamber. The braking torque can be controlled by the fluid viscosity of MR fluid with the variation of magnetic field. Compared with the traditional hydraulic retarder, the system has the advantages of fast response, easy control and high adjustment sensitivity.

The continuous braking for the brake drum will cause the brake thermal decay when the heavy truck is driving down the long slope in the mountain areas. It reduces the heavy truck’s braking performance and the braking safety. The engine braking and the hydraulic retarder braking both consume the kinetic energy of the heavy truck and can assist the truck driving in the mountain areas. This research proposes a combined hill descent braking strategy for heavy truck based on the recorded information of the slopes to ensure the braking safety of the heavy truck. The vehicle dynamic model and the brake drum temperature rising model are established to analyze the drum’s temperature variation during the downhill progress of the heavy truck. Then based on the slope information, the combined braking temperature variation is analyzed considering the characteristics of the engine braking, the drum braking and the hydraulic retarder braking.