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Crashworthiness is one of the most important performances of vehicles, and the front rails are the main crash energy absorption parts during the frontal crashing process. In this paper, the front rail was simplified to a thin-walled beam with a cross section of single-hat which was made of steel and aluminum. And the two boards of it were connected by riveting without rivets. In order to optimize its crashworthiness, the thickness (t), radius (R) and the rivet spacing (d) were selected as three design variables, and its specific energy absorption was the objective while the average impact force was the constraint. Considering the error of manufacturing and measurements, the parameters σs and Et of the steel were selected as the uncertainty variables to improve the design reliability. The algorithm IP-GA and the approximate model-RBF (Radial Basis Function) were applied in this nonlinear uncertainty optimization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Based on equivalent static loads method (ESL), a nonlinear dynamic topology optimization is carried out to optimize an automotive body in white (BIW) subjected to representative legislative crash loads, including frontal impact, side barrier impact, roof crush and rear impact. To meet the crashworthiness performances, two evaluation indexes are defined to convert the practical engineering problems into mathematic optimization problems. The strain energy is treated as the stiffness evaluation index of the BIW and the relative displacement is employed as the compliance index of the components and parts.

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.

For high levels autonomous driving functions, the Decision Layer often takes on more responsibility due to the requirement of facing more diverse and even rare conditions. It is very difficult to accurately find a safe and efficient lane change timing when autonomous vehicles encounter complex traffic flow and need to change lanes. The traditional method based on rules and experiences has the limitation that it is difficult to be taken into account all possible conditions. Therefore, this paper designs a lane-changing decision algorithm based on data-driven and machine learning, and uses the DQN (Deep Q Network) algorithm in Reinforcement Learning to determine the appropriate lane-changing timing and target lane. Firstly, the scene characteristics of the highway are analyzed, the input and output of the decision-making model are designated and the data from the Perception Layer are processed.

Based on the sample data obtained from the bench test of a four-cylinder naturally aspirated CNG engine, three different machine learning models, BP, SVM and GRNN, were used to develop the intake charge prediction model for the intake system of this engine, in which engine speed, intake manifold pressure and intake temperature, VVT angle and gas injection time were taken as input parameters and intake charge was used as output parameter. The comparative analysis of the experimental data and model prediction data showed that the mean absolute error (MAE) of BP model, GRNN model, and SVM model were 2.69, 8.11and 5.13, and the root mean square error (MSE) were 3.53, 9.29, and 7.17, respectively. BP model has smaller prediction error and higher accuracy than SVM and GRNN models, which is more suitable for the prediction of the intake charge of this type of four-cylinder naturally aspirated CNG engine.

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).

As turbulence modeling has become an indispensable approach to perform flow simulation in a wide range of industrial applications, how to enhance the prediction accuracy has gained increasing attention during the past years. Of all the turbulence models, RANS is the most common choice for many OEMs due to its short turn-around time and strong robustness. However, the default setting of RANS is usually benchmarked through classical and well-studied engineering examples, not always suitable for resolving complex flows in specific circumstances. Many previous researches have suggested a small tuning in turbulence model coefficients could achieve higher accuracy on a variety of flow scenarios. Instead of adjusting parameters by trial and error from experience, this paper introduced a new data-driven method of turbulence model recalibration using adjoint solver, based on Generalized k-ω (GEKO) model, one variant of RANS.

To improve the durability of Proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) in actual transportation application scenario, the research on fault diagnosis of PEMFC is receiving extensive attention. With the development of artificial intelligence, performing fault diagnosis with the massive sampling data of the fuel cell system has become a popular research topic. But few people have successfully verified the diagnosis performance of these artificial intelligence algorithms on a real high power on-board PEMFC system. Therefore, we intend to make a step forward with these data-driven artificial intelligence algorithms. We applied four data-driven artificial intelligence algorithms to diagnose three common faults of PEMFC (each fault type has two severity levels, slight and severe). AVL CRUISE M was firstly applied for generation of simulation fault dataset to speed up the algorithm screening process. Based on the dataset, these algorithms are trained and optimized.

The intersection is recognized as the most dangerous area because of the restricted road structures and indeterminate traffic regulations. Therefore, according to the Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and Digital Twin data, we present a potential energy field method to establish the general characteristics of intersection traffic safety, evaluate the safety situation of intersection and assist intersection traffic participants in passing through the intersection safer and more efficient. The resulting potential energy field method is established by the contour line of traffic participants' potential energy, which is constructed as a superposition of disparate energies, such as boundary potential energy, body potential energy, and velocity potential energy. The intersection traffic safety is evaluated by the potential energy field characteristic of simultaneous intersection traffic participants.

With the popularity of automated vehicles, the future mixed traffic flow contains automated vehicles with different degrees of intelligence developed by other manufacturers. Therefore, simulating the interaction behavior of automated vehicles with varying levels of intelligence is crucial for testing and evaluating autonomous driving systems. Since the algorithm of traffic vehicles with various intelligence levels is difficult to obtain, it leads to hardships in quantitatively characterizing their interaction behaviors. Therefore, this paper designs a new automated vehicle test platform to solve the problem. The intelligent vehicle testbed with multiple personalized in-vehicle control units in the loop consists of three parts: 1. Multiple controllers in the loop to simulate the behavior of traffic vehicles；2. The central console applies digital twin technology to share the same traffic scenario between the tested vehicle and the traffic vehicle, creating a mixed traffic flow. 3.

High-speed vehicles in low illumination environments severely blur the images used in object detectors, which poses a potential threat to object detector-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems. Augmenting the training images for object detectors is an efficient way to mitigate the threat from motion blur. However, little attention has been paid to the motion of the vehicle and the position of objects in the traffic scene, which limits the consistence between the resulting augmented images and traffic scenes. In this paper, we present a vehicle kinematics-based image augmentation algorithm by modeling and analyzing the traffic scenes to generate more realistic augmented images and achieve higher robustness improvement on object detectors against motion blur. Firstly, we propose a traffic scene model considering vehicle motion and the relationship between the vehicle and the object in the traffic scene.

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.