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Due to the variability of real traffic conditions for vehicle testing, real-world vehicle performance estimation using simulation method become vital. Especially for heavy duty vehicles (e.g. 40 t trucks), which are used for international freight transport, real-world tests are difficult, complex and expensive. Vehicle simulations use mathematical methods or commercial software, which take given driving cycles as inputs. However, the road situations in real driving are different from the driving cycles, whose speed profiles are obtained under specific conditions. In this paper, a real-world vehicle performance estimation method using simulation was proposed, also it took traffic and real road situations into consideration, which made it possible to investigate the performance of vehicles operating on any roads and traffic conditions. The proposed approach is applicable to all kind of road vehicles, e.g. trucks, buses, etc. In the method, the real-road network includes road elevation.

Research is currently being undertaken to develop improved suspensions for Combat Support Vehicles (CSV's). Part of this work focuses on the feasibility of using intelligent suspensions to continuously optimise the vehicles performance as the operating environment changes. For an intelligent suspension to be effective in this case, it should enable increased vehicle speed from an improvement in ride performance whilst not detracting from vehicle safety or handling performance. This paper investigates the power consumption of a CSV vehicle with a slow-active suspension. From the power consumption it is possible to estimate the extra fuel consumption and reduction in vehicle top speed. The power consumption was evaluated for a set of representative terrain profiles and vehicle speeds, demonstrating the trade off between suspension power consumption and ride performance improvement.

The work presented here seeks to compare different means of providing scavenging systems for an automotive 2-stroke engine. It follows on from previous work solely investigating uniflow scavenging systems, and aims to provide context for the results discovered there as well as to assess the benefits of a new scavenging system: the reverse-uniflow sleeve-valve. For the study the general performance of the engine was taken to be suitable to power a medium-duty truck, and all of the concepts discussed here were compared in terms of indicated fuel consumption for the same cylinder swept volume using a one-dimensional engine simulation package. In order to investigate the sleeve-valve designs layout drawings and analysis of the Rolls-Royce Crecy-type sleeve had to be undertaken.

To maximize CO2 reduction, refined straight used cooking oils were used as a fuel in Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) in this research. The fuel is called C2G Ultra Biofuel (C2G: Convert to Green Ltd) and is a fully renewable fuel made as a diesel replacement from processed used cooking oil, used directly in diesel engines specifically modified for this purpose. This is part of a large demonstration project involving ten 44-tonne trucks using C2G Ultra Biofuel as a fuel to partially replace standard diesel fuels. A dual fuel tank containing both diesel and C2G Ultra Biofuel and an on-board fuel blending system-Bioltec system was installed on each vehicle, which is able to heat the C2G Ultra Biofuel and automatically determine the required blending ratio of diesel and C2G Ultra Biofuel according to fuel temperature and engine load. The engine was started with diesel and then switched to C2G Ultra Biofuel under appropriate conditions.