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Fatigue behavior of aluminum alloys under multiaxial loading was investigated with both cast aluminum A356-T6 and wrought alloy 6063-T6. The dominant multiaxial fatigue crack preferentially nucleates from flaws like porosity and oxide films located near the free surface of the material. In the absence of the flaws, the cracking/debonding of the second phase particles dominates the crack initiation and propagation. The number of cracked/debonded particles increases with the number of cycles, but the damage rate depends on loading paths. Among various loading paths studied, the circle loading path shows the shortest fatigue life due to the development of complex dislocation substructures and severe stress concentration near grain/cell boundaries and second phase particles.

Gas distribution of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) is mainly decided by flow field of bipolar plate. The improper design of distributing channel, nonuniform gas flow distribution and current density distribution among different straight channels are the leading factors that could tremendously undermine the performance and life expectancy of the cell. However, there is lack of research focusing on distributing channel in straight-parallel flow field. In this work, a three-dimensional numerical model of PEMFC cathode flow field is developed with CFD method to investigate the effects of configuration type and width of the distributing channel on pressure distribution in distributing channel and on reactant flow distribution, pressure drop and concentration distribution in multiple straight channel. Effects of electrochemical reaction and formation of water on the flow distribution are taken into consideration.

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC), which convert the chemical energy into electrical energy directly through electrochemical reactions, are widely considered as one of the best power sources for new energy vehicles (NEV). Some of the major advantages of a PEMFC include high power density, high energy conversion efficiency, minimum pollution, low noise, fast startup and low operating temperature. The Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) is one of the core components of fuel cells, which composes catalyst layers (CL) coated proton exchange membrane (PEM) and gas diffusion layers (GDL). The performance of MEA is closely related to mass transportation and the rate of electrochemical reaction. The MEA plays a key role not only in the performance of the PEMFCs, but also for the reducing the cost of the fuel cells, as well as accelerating the commercial applications. Commercialized large-size MEA directly plays a major role in determining fuel cell stack and vehicle performance.

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) uses hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, the whole energy conversion process almost has no negative impact on the environment. The PEM fuel cell stack with the advantages of low-operating temperature, high current density and fast start-up ability is considered to be the next generation of new electric vehicle power. However, due to the limited current output, it is difficult for a single cell to meet the practical application requirements. The actual fuel cell stack is formed by many single cells assembled together. The assembly process is often related to load transfer, material transfer, energy exchange, multi-phase flow, electrochemical reaction and other factors. The performance of MEA (Membrane Electrode Assembly), sealing gaskets and other components will change during the assembly process, which makes the fuel cell stack assembly process more complex.

In this paper, a low-speed pre-ignition (LSPI) diagnostic strategy is designed based on the ion current signal. Novel diagnostic and re-injection strategies are proposed to suppress super-knock induced by pre-ignition within the detected combustion cycle. A parallel controller system that integrates a regular engine control unit (ECU) and CompactRIO (cRIO) from National Instruments (NI) is employed. Based on this system, the diagnostic and suppression strategy can be implemented without any adaptions to the regular ECU. Experiments are conducted on a 1.5-liter four-cylinder, turbocharged, direct-injected gasoline engine. The experimental results show two kinds of pre-ignition, one occurs spontaneously, and the other is induced by carbon deposits. Carbon deposits on the spark plug can strongly interfere with the ion current signal. By applying the ion current signal, approximately 14.3% of spontaneous and 90% of carbon induced pre-ignition cycles can be detected.

Due to the advantages of low weight, low emissions and good fuel economy, downsized turbocharged gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines are widely-applied nowadays. However, Low-Speed Pre-Ignition (LSPI) phenomenon observed in these engines restricts their improvement of performance. Some researchers have shown that auto-ignition of lubricant in the combustion chamber has a great effect on the LSPI frequency. To study the auto-ignition characteristics of lubricant, an innovative single droplet auto-ignition test system for lubricant and its mixture is designed and developed, with better accuracy and effectiveness. The experiments are carried out by hanging lubricant droplets on the thermocouple node under active thermo-atmosphere provided by a small “Dibble burner”. The auto-ignition process of lubricant droplets is recorded by a high-speed camera.

The present work proposed to implement oxy-fuel combustion mode into a homogeneous charge compression ignition engine to reduce complexity in engine emissions after-treatment and lower carbon dioxide emission. The combination of oxy-fuel combustion mode with homogeneous charge compression ignition engine can be further optimized by the utilization of direct high temperature and pressure water injection to improve cycle performance. A retrofitted conventional diesel engine coupled with port fuel injection and direct water injection is utilized in this study. A self-designed oxygen and carbon dioxide mixture intake system with flexible oxygen fraction adjustment ability is implemented in the test bench to simulate the adoption of exhaust gas recirculation. Water injection system is directly installed in the combustion chamber with a modified high speed solenoid diesel injector.

Startup from subzero temperature is one of the major challenges for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) to realize commercialization. Below the freezing point (0°C), water will freeze easily, which blocks the reactant gases into the reaction sites, thus leading to the start failure and material degradation. Therefore, for PEMFC in vehicle application, finding suitable ways to reach successful startup from subfreezing environment is a prerequisite. As it’s difficult and complex for experimental studies to measure the internal quantities, mathematical models are the effective ways to study the detailed transport process and physical phenomenon, which make it possible to achieve detailed prediction of the inner life of the cell. However, review papers only on cold start numerical models are not available. In this study, an extensive review on cold start models is summarized featuring the states and phase changes of water, heat and mass transfer.

Environmental perception is a crucial subsystem in autonomous vehicles. In order to build safe and efficient traffic transportation, several researches have been proposed to build accurate, robust and real-time perception systems. Camera and LiDAR are widely equipped on autonomous self-driving cars and developed with many algorithms in recent years. The fusion system of camera and LiDAR provides state-of the-art methods for environmental perception due to the defects of single vehicular sensor. Extrinsic parameter calibration is able to align the coordinate systems of sensors and has been drawing enormous attention. However, differ from spatial alignment of two sensors’ data, joint calibration of multi-sensors (more than two sensors) should balance the degree of alignment between each two sensors.

Based on the working model of a diesel engine, the influence of 2 Miller cycle strategies-Early Intake Valve Closure (EIVC) and Late Intake Valve Closure (LIVC) on the combustion and emissions of diesel engine was analyzed. Then the working condition of each Miller cycle strategies on the engine under the rated speed was optimized through the adjust of the valve timing, boost pressure and the injection timing. The research found that both delaying and advancing the closure timing of the intake valve can decrease the pressure and temperature during compression stroke, prolonging the ignition delay. However, due to the decrease of the working media inside the cylinder, the average in-cylinder temperature and soot emissions will increase, which can be alleviated by raising the boost pressure and the resulting compensation of the intake loss.

The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system has emerged as the state-of-art power source for the electric vehicle, but the widespread commercial application of fuel cell vehicle is restricted by its short service life. An enabling high accuracy model holds the key for better understanding, simulation, analysis, subsystem control of the fuel cell system to extract full power and prolong the lifespan. In this paper, a quasi-dynamic lumped parameters model for a 3kW stack is introduced, which includes filling-and-emptying volume sub-models for the relationships between periphery signals and internal states, static water transferring sub-model for the membrane, and empirical electrochemical sub-model for the voltage response. Several dynamic experiments are carried out to identify unknown parameters of the model.

Fuel cell vehicles (FCV) have become a promising transportation tool because of their high efficiency, fast response and zero-emission. However, the cold start problem is one of the main obstacles to limit the further commercialization of FCV in cold weather countries. Many efforts have made to improve the cold start ability. This review presents comprehensive heating methods and influence factors of the research progress in solving the Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) system cold start problems with more than 100 patents, papers and reports, which may do some help for PEMFC system cold start from the point of practical utilization. Firstly, recent achievements and goals will be summarized in the introduction part. Then, regarding the heating strategies for the PEMFC system cold start, different heating solutions are classified into self-heating strategies and auxiliary-heating heating depending on their heating sources providing approach.

A new range-extension hybrid powertrain concept, namely the Tongji Extended-range Hybrid Technology (TJEHT) was developed and demonstrated in this study. This hybrid system is composed of a direct-injection gasoline engine, a traction motor, an Integrated Starter-Generator (ISG) motor, and a transmission. In addition, an electronically controlled clutch between the ISG motor and engine, and an electronically controlled synchronizer between the ISG motor and transmission are also employed in the transmission case. Hence, this system can provide six basic operating modes including the single-motor driving, dual-motor driving, serial driving, parallel driving, engine-only driving and regeneration mode depending on the engagement status of the clutch and synchronizer. Importantly, the unique dual-motor operation mode can improve vehicle acceleration performance and the overall operating efficiency.

In recent years, particulate matters (PM) emissions from gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines have been gradually paid attention to, and the hydrous ethanol has a high oxygen content and a fast burning rate, which can effectively improve the combustion environment. In addition, Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) can effectively reduce engine NOx emissions, and combining EGR technology with GDI engines is becoming a new research direction. In this study, the effects of hydrous ethanol gasoline blends on the combustion and emission characteristics of GDI engines are analyzed through bench test. The results show that the increase of the proportion of hydrous ethanol can accelerate the burning rate, shorten the combustion duration by 7°crank angle (CA), advance the peak moment of in-cylinder pressure and rate of heat release (RoHR) and improve the combustion efficiency. The hydrous ethanol gasoline blends can effectively improve the gaseous and PM emissions of the GDI engine.

To meet the request of China National 6b emission regulations which will be officially implemented in China, firstly including the RDE emission test limits, the transient emissions on real road condition are paid more attention. A non-plug-in hybrid light-duty gasoline vehicles (HEV) sold in the Chinese market was selected to study real road emissions employed fast response NOx analyzer from Cambustion Ltd. with a sampling frequency of 100Hz, which can measure the missing NO peaks by standard RDE gas analyzer now. Emissions from PEMS were also recorded and compared with the results from fast response NOx analyzer. The concentration of NOx emissions before and after the Three Way Catalyst (TWC) of the hybrid vehicle were also sampled and analyzed, and the working efficiency of the TWC in real road driving process was investigated.

Tracking vehicle trajectories is essential for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems to understand traffic environment and evaluate collision risk. In order to reduce the position deviation and fluctuation of tracking on-road vehicle by millimeter-wave radar (MMWR), an interactive multi-model Kalman filter (IMM-KF) tracking algorithm including data association and track management is proposed. In general, it is difficult to model the target vehicle accurately due to lack of vehicle kinematics parameters, like wheel base, uncertainty of driving behavior and limitation of sensor’s field of view. To handle the uncertainty problem, an interacting multiple model (IMM) approach using Kalman filters is employed to estimate multitarget’s states. Then the compensation of radar ego motion is achieved, since the original measurement is under the radar polar coordinate system.

Recently, electro-hydraulic brake systems (EHB) has been developed to take place of the vacuum booster, having the advantage of faster pressure build-up and continuous pressure regulation. In contrast to the vacuum booster, the pressure estimation for EHB is worth to be studied due to its abundant resource (i.e. electric motor) and cost-effective benefit. This work improves an interconnected pressure estimation algorithm (IPEA) based on actuator characteristics by introducing the vehicle dynamics and validates it via vehicle tests. Considering the previous IPEA as the prior pressure estimation, the wheel speed feedback is used for modification via a proportional-integral (PI) observer. Superior to the IPEA based on actuator characteristics, the proposed PEA improves the accuracy by more than 20% under the mismatch of pressure-position relation.

Water and thermal management is an essential issue that influences performance and durability of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Water content in membrane decides its ionic conductivity and membrane swelling favors the ionic conductivity, resulting in decreases in the membrane’s ohmic resistance and improvement in the output voltage. However, if excessive liquid water can’t be removed out of cell quickly, it will fill in the pores of catalyst layer (CL) and gas diffusion layer (GDL) then flooding may occur. It is essential to keep the water content in membrane at a proper level. In this work, a transient isothermal one-dimensional model is developed to investigate effects of the relative humidity of inlet gas and cell temperature on performance of a PEMFC.

With increasing pressure from environment problem for reduction in CO2 emissions and stricter fuel targets from road vehicles, new transmission technologies are gaining more attention in different main market. To get suitable road load data for transmission durability development is becoming increasingly important and can shorten the development time of new transmission. This paper presents the procedure and methods of road load data development for durability design of transmission product and optimization based on the real road data measurement, statistical characteristics evaluation and fatigue damage equivalency. Apply this road load data method procedure on 3 type of vehicle which represent conventional vehicle, BEV and HEV.

Multi-sensor information fusion framework is the eyes for unmanned driving and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) to perceive the surrounding environment. In addition to the perception of the surrounding environment, real-time vehicle localization is also the key and difficult point of unmanned driving technology. The disappearance of high-precision GPS signal suddenly and defect of the lane line will bring much more difficult and dangerous for vehicle localization when the vehicle is on unmanned driving. In this paper, a road boundary feature extraction algorithm is proposed based on multi-sensor information fusion of automotive radar and vision to realize the auxiliary localization of vehicles. Firstly, we designed a 79GHz (78-81GHz) Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) millimeter-wave radar, which can obtain the point cloud information of road boundary features such as guardrail or green belt and so on.