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Wide attention to fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) comes from two huge issues currently the world is facing with: the concern of the petroleum reserves depletion due to consequent oil dependence and the earth global warming due in some extent to vehicle emissions. In this background, Hyundai, along with its sister company Kia, has been building the FCEVs and operating their test fleet with several tens of units at home and abroad. Since 2004, 32 passenger vehicles have been offered for the Department of Energy's controlled hydrogen fleet and infrastructure demonstration and validation project in the U.S. In the meantime, from 2006, 30 passenger vehicles as well as four buses, featuring the in-house developed fuel cell stack and its associated components, are currently under the domestic operation for the FCEV learning demonstration led by the Ministry of Knowledge and Economy.

In order to extend the operability limit of the gasoline compression ignition (GCI) engine, as an avenue for low temperature combustion (LTC) regime, the effects of parametric variations of engine operating conditions on the performance of six-stroke GCI (6S-GCI) engine cycle are numerically investigated, using an in-house 3D CFD code coupled with high-fidelity physical sub-models along with the Chemkin library. The combustion and emissions were calculated using a skeletal chemical kinetics mechanism for a 14-component gasoline surrogate fuel. Authors’ previous study highlighted the effects of the variation of injection timing and split ratio on the overall performance of 6S-GCI engine and the unique mixing-controlled burning mode of the charge mixtures during the two additional strokes. As a continuing effort, the present study details the parametric studies of initial gas temperature, boost pressure, fuel injection pressure, compression ratio, and EGR ratio.

The series-parallel hybrid electric vehicle(HEV), which employs a planetary gear set to combine one internal combustion engine(ICE) and two electric motors(EMs), can take advantages of both series and parallel hybrid system. The efficient powertrain operating point of the system can be obtained by the instantaneous optimization of equivalent fuel consumption. However, heavy computational requirements and variable constraints of the optimization process make it difficult to build real-time control strategy. To overcome the difficulty, this study suggests the control strategy which divides the optimization process into 2 stages. In the first stage, a target of charge/discharge power is determined based on equivalent fuel consumption, then in the second stage, an engine operating point is determined taking power transfer efficiency into account.

In this study, a series of tests have been carried out to evaluate the effects of the injection rate and timing on bsfc, NOx, and PM emissions in a heavy-duty diesel engine with TICS FIE system. Injection line pressure, cylinder pressure, NOx and smoke were measured with various injection times and injection rates. The injection rate was altered at a fixed injection timing, which could be realized either by changing the TICS setting time or by using different cam profiles. The injection time was varied by using TICS timing control function at a given setting time. A parametric study of the injection rate in in-line pump system was tried to correlate injection rate variations with combustion characteristics and emission. Two parameters, the injection pressure rising rate and the initially injected fuel quantity were introduced to characterize fuel injection.

Due to technological evolutions and social demands, motor vehicles are requested to be enhanced in terms of occupant safety and comfort. As a result, many countries are reinforcing crash regulations and new car assessment programs. Automotive seats are essential parts for providing passenger safety and comfort and have become most important. Many automotive companies concentrate on optimization of the seat structure. This paper presents an overview of the recent evolution of the seat structures and gives a development procedure covering seat frame design, optimization and validation. Through the study, a competitive frame design is drawn as a case result and a design guideline and a standard development procedure is established

Due to aging of a battery over lifetime, the rated power and nominal energy capacity will be reduced compared with the initial rated power and capacity. These result in influences on the vehicle driving performance and fuel economy. To monitor and diagnose the aging of the battery, in this paper, the method of predicting the available rated power and energy capacity of Li-ion battery under in-vehicle condition is proposed. Under constant power test, available power is calculated from the estimated parameters using recursive least square method. Further, available energy capacity is evaluated through SOH(cn) defined by the ratio of initial state-of-charge (SOC) variation to present SOC (\GdSOC ⁿ /ΔSOC ⁿ ) variation under arbitrary in-vehicle driving cycles. To verify the proposed method, experiments for aging Li-ion battery are performed in hybrid electric vehicle.

Emission of carbon dioxide from mobile sources seriously concerned to solve greenhouse effect and high price of gasoline in some countries have resulted in the development of lean-burn concept engine. In spite of many studies on the lean deNOx catalyst, we have no clear solution to obtain high fuel economy and high efficiency of NOx conversion in lean-burn application. This paper describes applicability and problems of NOx adsorber system to partial lean-burn vehicle, the development of three-way catalyst with improvement of washcoat technology based on three-way catalyst used for gasoline application, and comparison test results of evaluations is synthesized gas activity test, Federal Test Procedure (FTP) test, etc. This study shows improved three-way catalysts in partial lean- burn vehicle have max. 89% of NOx conversion in FTP without adding rich spike and regeneration functions to engine management system.

This paper presents an in-vehicle information system, AVICS in development. With AVICS, the driver could get the various information on traffic, news, weather, restaurants, and so on, which the AVICS information center provides via mobile telecommunication network. The driver requests the information to operator in center by voice with hands-free system or by handling the menu offered in the form of web-page. The in-vehicle unit for AVICS is designed to interface with wireless network with a built-in RF MODEM, to control NAVI system, and to display the information on the LCD monitor of AV system. The Internet browser is customized to parse specific HTML tags, application software is realized on 32-bit RISC processor. In this paper, we will overview the concept of AVICS and focus on development of in-vehicle unit of AVICS.

Recently weight reduction is increasingly needed in automotive industry to improve fuel efficiency and to meet a CO2 emission requirement. In this paper, we prepared composite body panels for the lightweight vehicle based on a small passenger car. Fender, roof, door, side outer panel, and tailgate are made from hand layup using a glass/carbon hybrid reinforcement. Hood is made from low pressure sheet molding compound (SMC) to investigate feasibility of mass production. Both hand layup and low pressure SMC materials are newly developed and their physical properties are examined. CAE simulation was done for strength analysis and optimization of thickness for the body panels.

Conventional steering system has a mechanical connection between the driver and the front tires of the vehicle, but in steer-by-wire system, there is no such a connection. Instead, actuators, positioned in the vehicle's front corners receive input from the control module and turn the front wheels accordingly. In steer-by-wire system, steering wheel is an important part that not only transfers driver's steering input to the controller but also provides a road feedback feeling to the driver's hand. Thus the reactive torque actuator, providing road feedback, plays an important role in steer-by-wire system. In conventional steer-by-wire-system, a motor was used as a reactive torque actuator. But using motor has some disadvantages such as an oscillatory feeling, and improper and potentially dangerous acceleration of the steering wheel by the motor when driver's hands are released from steering wheel abruptly.

High pressure fuel injection systems, such as common rail (CR) systems and electronically-controlled unit injector (EUI) systems, have been widely applied to modern heavy duty diesel engines. They are shown to be very effective for achieving high power density with high fuel efficiency and low exhaust gas emissions. However, the increased peak combustion pressure gives additional structural stress and thermal load to engine structure. Thus, proper material selection and thermal analysis of engine components are essential in order to meet the durability requirements of heavy-duty diesel engines adopting a high pressure injection system. In this paper, thermal analysis of a 12.9 ℓ diesel engine with an EUI system was studied. Temperatures were measured on a cylinder head, a piston and a cylinder liner. A specially designed linkage system was used to measure the piston temperatures. A radio-tracer technique was also used to verify the rotation of piston rings.

Hands-free stability, one of the handling characteristics of a vehicle, is a stability criterion evaluated in case of a driver's steering wheel release after a certain steering input during driving. During the development process, a hands-free-unstable vehicle needs many steering and suspension parts to be repeatedly tested to improve the performance. In this paper, CAE methods are proposed to investigate easily the influence of the steering and suspension design parameters on the hands-free stability. And the results of CAE methods were compared with the prototype vehicle test to verify the validity of the methods.

Hyundai has developed a Santa Fe fuel cell vehicle (FCV) in which methanol fuel processor is installed and integrated with PEM fuel cell system. Pure hydrogen is produced from the mixture of methanol and water by steam reforming followed by metal membrane purification and is then fed to fuel cell system to generate electrical energy. This system has the advantage of simplifying the integration of fuel cell subsystem and fuel processor subsystem. The operation of brassboard system has been carried out for performance evaluation and the development of fuel cell controller. And then the methanol reforming fuel cell system has been incorporated into electric drive train in the vehicle. AC induction motor is powered by the hybrid system using fuel cell and a nickel metal hydride battery as energy sources to improve the system efficiency and the acceleration response of the vehicle.

Fuel tank in vehicle must hold the fuel in a stable way under any driving condition. However, the fuel tank might not conserve the fuel firmly in case a crack emerged while the fuel tank is exposed to different driving condition. Basically, when the engine is in purging at a normal ambient temperature before fuel boiling, the pressure inside the fuel tank decreases. However, the pressure inside a fuel tank increases while a vehicle is driven at extreme hot ambient temperature as fuel is boiling. This repetitive pressure change in the fuel tank comes with fuel tank’s physical expansion and shrink, which would cause a damage to the fuel tank. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the root cause of why fuel tank cracks at a fatigue point. We also aim to set up the method of how to test durability of the fuel tank in association with the pressure inside the tank.

An integrated starter and generator (ISG) is a type of electric machine which is mechanically connected to an internal combustion engine (ICE). The ISG is intended to conduct important roles in the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) such as engine start and stop. Since the HEV has frequent electric vehicle (EV)/HEV mode transition, rapid engine cranking and vibration-free engine stop controls are necessary. In the case of the engine stop, the ISG provides the negative torque output to the ICE which can rapidly escape from its resonance speed. However, the ISG torque is determined by engineering intuition, the amount of energy recovery is hardly considered. Dynamic programming (DP) is an effective solution to find optimal ISG control strategy to maximize energy recovery during engine stop transition. Even though DP is an offline algorithm, the result can be used as a reference to evaluate and improve an existing on-line algorithm.

A nano-sized PM and THC emission characteristics were investigated according to the fuel injection strategy such as a pressure and timing in the GDI engine. On the part-load condition, the particulate emissions exhibited a strong sensitivity to the injection timing. The fuel injection pressure also had a great association with the nano-particles and THC. A size of PM exhausted from the GDI engine located near 10nm on the part-load. In contrast, accumulation mode particles within 60 - 80nm mainly exhausted during the cold transient start phase. Increment of fuel injection pressure positively affected on the nano-particle and THC emissions during the start of the engine, as well.

The Eco-driving indicator is a colored lamp on a cluster to lead a driver to smoothen acceleration of a vehicle. Informed by the indicator, a driver learns how deep to push a gas pedal for a better fuel economy. The Eco-driving guide system outputs a vehicle fuel efficient state by the Eco-driving indicator. It is based on BSFC map, engine torque map, A/T shift pattern data, engine operation status and transmission operating status. With the Eco-driving guide system, vehicle fuel efficiency can be improved by 4∼26%.

Recently, in accordance with the increased interest of consumer in fuel efficiency due to the phenomenon of high oil price, complaints against actual fuel efficiency in the road in comparison with the certified fuel efficiency have been raised frequently. Especially in case of the hybrid vehicle which is highly popular for the reason of its high fuel efficiency compared with that of existing gasoline car, deviation in the fuel efficiency will be higher compared with that of gasoline car in accordance with the driving mode (downtown/highway), driver's driving style (wild/mild) and external environmental condition (gradient/temperature/altitude). To solve them, this paper developed a method so that the SOC (State Of Charge), EV/HEV mode transition point can be controlled variably in accordance with the driving mode, driver's driving style and external environmental condition by making the most of characteristics of hybrid.

A traffic situation is getting more complex in urban areas. Various safety systems of an automobile have been developed but fatal and serious accidents still can be made by driver's faults or distractions. The system supporting extend of driver's recognition area is going to be an important part of future intelligent vehicles in order to prevent accidents. In this paper we propose sensor fusion system based on a digital-map for driver assistance. The accurate localization of a host vehicle is achieved by a stereo vision sensor and a digital-map using polygon matching algorithm in urban area. A single-row laser scanner is used for tracking multiple moving objects. The coordinate transformation from sensor frame to global frame is performed to visualize the moving objects on a digital-map. An experiment was conducted in an urban canyon where the GPS signals are frequently interrupted.

Recently, flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) has been drawn great attention because of its response for immediate use as alternative fueled one. Hyundai FFV can be operated on arbitrary fuel mixtures between gasoline and M85 with the specially programmed electronic control unit (ECU) which can determine optimized fueling quantity and ignition timing as the methanol content by the signal from electrostatic type fuel sensor. In this paper, the results of various tests including engine performance, cold startability, durability and exhaust emission reduction have been described. Full load, cold mode durability tests and field trials have been carried out with some material changes and surface treatments in the lubricating parts and fuel system. But, more work on its durability improvement is still required.