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The performance of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) that recovers heat from the exhaust of a heavy-duty diesel engine was simulated. The work was an extension of a prior study that simulated the performance of an experimental ORC system developed and tested at Oak Ridge National laboratory (ORNL). The experimental data were used to set model parameters and validate the results of that simulation. For the current study the model was adapted to consider a 15 liter turbocharged engine versus the original 1.9 liter light-duty automotive turbodiesel studied by ORNL. Exhaust flow rate and temperature data for the heavy-duty engine were obtained from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) for a range of steady-state engine speeds and loads without EGR. Because of the considerably higher exhaust gas flow rates of the heavy-duty engine, relative to the engine tested by ORNL, a different heat exchanger type was considered in order to keep exhaust pressure drop within practical bounds.

In the intelligent speed planning system, real-time estimation of road slope is the key to calculate slope resistance and realize the vehicles’ active safety control. However, if the road slope is measured by the sensor while the commercial vehicle is driving, the vibration of the vehicle body will affect its measurement accuracy. Therefore, the relevant algorithm is used to estimate the real-time slope of the road when the commercial vehicle is driving. At present, many domestic and foreign scholars have analyzed and tested the estimation of road slope by the least square method or Kalman filter algorithm. Although the two methods both can achieve the estimation, the real-time performance and accuracy still need to be improved. In this paper, for traditional fuel commercial vehicle, the Kalman filter algorithm based on the kinematics and the extended Kalman filter algorithm based on the longitudinal dynamics are respectively used to estimate the road slope.

On-road testing of driving performance of the urban bus was carried out, and a representative urban bus driving cycle was developed after on-road testing, according to the test results. Then, the vehicle simulation software AVL CRUISE was used to simulate the dynamic behavior of the urban bus. It involves the simulation of complete drive train system and the driver behavior. The model is validated by comparing the results of the simulation to the results of the field test. Then the developed driving cycle is evaluated by fuel consumption resulted from the simulation and engine bench test on fuel economy.

A 3-D numerical analysis model of transient heat transfer among the multi-component coupling system in combustion chamber of internal combustion engine has been developed successfully in the paper. The model includes almost all solid components in combustion chamber, such as piston assembly, cylinder liner, cylinder head gasket, cylinder head, intake valves and exhaust valves, etc. With two different coupling heat transfer modes, one is the lubricant film heat conduction between two moving components, another is the contact heat conduction between two immovable solid components, and with the direct coupled-field analysis method of FEM, the heat transfer relation among the components is established. The simulation result dedicates the transient heat transfer process among the components such as moving piston assembly and cylinder liner, moving valves and cylinder head. The effect of cylinder head gasket on heat transfer among the components is also studied.

A new type of dual fuel supply system has been developed. This system is able to economically convert conventional diesel engines into dual-fuel engines like LPG/Diesel engines and CNG/Diesel engines, which are capable of either using single diesel fuel or using dual-fuel including both diesel and CNG fuel or both diesel and LPG fuel. These diesel-LPG engines have been applied to the diesel buses in the public transportation of Guangzhou city, one of the biggest cities in China, owning to their low soot emissions, excellent operating performances and extremely low cost as well. Compared with the diesel baseline engine, it was found that there were a significant reduction in soot emission and an improvement of the fuel consumption with the diesel-LPG engine. Also the strategy on LPG content is discussed in order to meet the demands for soot emission, fuel economy, transient performance and output power at the same time.

The drivers' hysteretic perception to surrounding environment will affect vehicular fuel economy, especially for the heavy-duty vehicles driving under complex conditions and long distance in mountainous areas. Unreasonable acceleration or deceleration on the slope will increase the fuel consumption. Improving the performance of the engine and the transmission system has limited energy saving potential, and most fuel-efficient driving assistant systems don't consider the road conditions. The main purpose of this research is to introduce an economic driving scheme with consideration of the prestored slope information in which the vehicle speed in mountainous slopes is reasonably planned to guide the driver's behavior for reduction of the fuel consumption. Economic driving optimization algorithm with low space dimension and fast computation speed is established to plan accurate and real-time economic driving scheme.

This research is based on the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, and briefly analyzed its communication protocol with reference to the layered model of Open System Interconnect Reference Model (OSI). Subsequently, a data acquisition system was designed and developed including a Vehicle Communication Interface (VCI) and a laptop. After the overall architecture was built, the communication mechanism of the VCI was studied. Furthermore, the lap top app was built using the layered design followed by the implementation of a scheme for data collection and experimentation involving the test driving of a real car on road. Finally, the driving style was identified by means of fuzzy reasoning and solving ambiguity based on fuzzy theory; via training the acceleration sample and forecast using the excellent learning and generalization ability of Support Vector Machine (SVM) for high-dimensional, finite samples.

Due to the increase of mining production and rising labor costs, manufacturers of construction and mining equipment are engaged in developing large tonnage mining truck with good dynamic performance and high transport efficiency. This paper focuses on the improvement of the dynamic performance of a 52t off-highway dump truck. According to the characteristics of its operating cycle, electric auxiliary drive system is installed in the front axle aiming at improving the utilization rate of ground adhesion. The new all-wheel drive hybrid electric system makes it possible for dump truck transports at a higher velocity. Both the conventional dump truck model and the new all-wheel drive hybrid truck model are built based on the AVL-Cruise platform. Meanwhile, under the premise of enough dynamic performance, fuel consumption can be minimized by collaborative optimization in Isight.

It is well-known that, compared with automatic transmissions (ATs), continuously variable transmission (CVT) shows advantages in fuel saving due to its continuous shift manner, since this feature enables the engine to operate in the efficiency-optimized region. However, as the AT gear number increases and the ratio gap narrows, this advantage of CVT is challenged. In this paper, a comparative study on fuel economy for a CVT based vehicle and a 9-speed automatic transmission (AT) based vehicle is proposed. The features of CVT and AT are analyzed and ratio control strategies for both the CVT and 9-speed AT based vehicles are designed from the view point of vehicle fuel economy, respectively. For the 9-speed AT, an optimal gear shift map is constructed. With this gear shift map, the optimal gear is selected as vehicle velocity and driving condition vary.

Systematic research on dynamic model, simulation analyses, prototype production and bench tests have been carried out in recent years on the most popular energy-harvesting shock absorbers-the mechanical motion rectifier (MMR), and the hydraulic-electromagnetic energy-regenerative shock absorber (HESA). This paper presents a novel application of the HESA into bogie system of railway vehicles. In order to study the differences of suspension performance and energy harvesting property between first suspension system and second suspension system of the application, simulation models are built in AMESim to make comparison studies on the different department suspensions caused by the nonlinear damping behaviors of the HESA. The simulation results show that the system can effectively reduce the impact between wheel and rail tracks, while maintaining good potential to recycle vibratory energy.

The thermal management system of the water medium retarder using engine coolant (water and ethylene glycol) as transmission medium, omits oil-water heat exchanger in the structure. When the hydraulic retarder is operated, the valve is connected with the retarder and water pump, and then the engine coolant enters the working chamber. The kinetic energy of the vehicle is converted into internal energy of the coolant, and the heat is discharged to the external environment through the engine thermal management system. The braking torque of the water medium hydraulic retarder is determined by the water medium flow rate in the working chamber. The smaller the valve opening degree, the greater the braking torque and the faster the heating transmission fluid. Small valve opening is not conducive to the loss of heat. It will affect the normal working of the engine and hydraulic retarder.

A patented VCC (variable combustion chamber) piston mechanism is presented, by which excess in-cylinder pressure would be able to be limited effectively based on each working cycle while a spark-ignition engine running with higher CR (compression ratio) of 12.0:1. A conventional engine can be converted to a VCC engine just by replacing its typical pistons with VCC pistons. Besides the benefits that VCR (Variable Compression Ratio) has been still pursued so far, there would be other advantages for VCC engine, such as excellent fuel economy at each load not only at light loads, and the improvement of cycle-by-cycle variation of in-cylinder pressure, and high reliability with simple structure. The innovative design of VCC piston is introduced. The main design features of VCC piston are a VCC mechanism assembled between the piston crown and the piston skirt, and a special reset cam assembled at the wrist-pin end of the connecting rod.

Heavy commercial vehicle drivers may frequently shift gears when they are running on long and downhill roads in mountainous area. In order to improve driving safety and fuel economy, it is necessary to predict the slope of the road ahead in real time and correct the driver's shift strategy in time. At present, the road slope estimation is mainly based on the real-time estimation of the road slope at the current position of the vehicle based on the vehicle driving information obtained by the sensors, but the road slope of the road section that the vehicle is about to reach has not been predicted. In this paper, based on the road slope information of the road section that the driver has driven through, combined with Geographic Information System (GIS) information and road design standards, the slope of the road section ahead is predicted.

Because of the long driving range and good power performance, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) have drawn much attention. And the current fuel-saving effect of PHEV still has a lot of room for improvement. The complex powertrain structure of PHEV makes the requirements for control strategy be increasing. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an efficient control strategy to ensure that the PHEV operates at optimal performance with an improved driving range. This paper establishes a mathematical model for fuel economy control of PHEV, by treating the torque distribution problem as a multi-stage decision optimization problem, and establishes a global energy management strategy based on a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. Based on the actual physical model, this paper creatively solves the correction range of battery SOC value according to the charge and discharge power of the motor, which greatly reduces the calculation time of the DP algorithm.

For series hybrid electric vehicles (SHEV), rule-based strategies are realistic and powerful in real-time applications. However, the previous rule-based strategy cannot strike a balance between the best fuel economy and the best battery performance while maintaining the advantages of real-time applications. In order to obtain higher efficiency and reduce battery consumption, we have developed an adaptive hybrid thermostat strategy. On the basis of maintaining the load leveling of the thermostat strategy, the threshold-changing mechanism is added to realize the adaptive adjustment of the engine starting power under different SOC conditions, so as to achieve the goal of prolonging the battery life. In addition, the more fuel-efficient emergency handling rules designed to further reduce comprehensive fuel consumption.

The plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) gradually moves into the mainstream market with its excellent power and energy consumption control, and has become the research target of many researchers. The energy management strategy of plug-in hybrid vehicles is more complicated than conventional gasoline vehicles. Therefore, there are still many problems to be solved in terms of power source distribution and energy saving and emission reduction. This research proposes a new solution and realizes it through simulation optimization, which improves the energy consumption and emission problems of PHEV to a certain extent. First, on the basis that MATLAB software has completed the modeling of the key components of the vehicle, the fuzzy controller of the vehicle is established considering the principle of the joint control of the engine and the electric motor.

The hydraulic retarder, which is an auxiliary brake device for enhancing traffic safety, has been widely used in kinds of heavy commercial vehicles. When the vehicle equipped with the retarder is traveling in non-braking state, the transmission loss would be caused because of the stirring air between working wheels of the rotor and the stator no matter if the retarder connects in parallel or in series with the transmission [1]. This paper introduces an elaborate hydraulic retarder air-friction reduction system (AFRS) which consists of a vacuum generating module and pneumatic control module. AFRS works to reduce the air friction by decreasing the gas density between working wheels when the retarder is in non-braking state. The pneumatic control model of hydraulic retarder is built first. Then various driving conditions are considered to verify the performance of the AFRS. The stability of the AFRS is analyzed based on the complete driveline model.

In order to make full use of engine exhaust heat, the thermoelectric module been used to contribute to thermoelectric power generation in the automotive. At present, the thermoelectric generators (TEGs) have been developing with continuously advances in thermoelectric technology. And almost all of the existing thermoelectric technologies are adding a gas tank to the vehicle exhaust system which increases the exhaust back pressure and occupying excessive space of the vehicle chassis. In this study, a new TEG integrated with a front silencer muffler (FMTEG) is proposed. The muffler is reshaped as the heat exchanger which has a hexagon cross-section. The water tank and clamping mechanism have been redesigned for the new heat exchanger. The FMTEG system’s dimensions are small that can well meet the installation requirements and has a good compatibility with the vehicle exhaust system.

With great development of thermoelectric exhaust heat recovery technology, more and more attention has been paid to optimization of automotive thermoelectric generators (ATEGs). A lot of work has been done on optimization of flow field and thermal analysis. However, investigation on acoustic optimization is rather limited. In this paper, efforts have been paid to study the acoustic performance of a flat-plate TEG, and the feasibility of integration of automotive exhaust thermoelectric generator with muffler was discussed. The internal configuration of heat exchanger looks like “fishbone”. Four factors have been taken into consideration: the spacing of two fins, angle of the fins, the diameter of inlet and outlet of exchanger; and filling sound absorbing material in heat exchanger chamber. Based on these four factors, acoustic analysis was carried out.

Vehicle exhaust waste-heat recovery with thermoelectric power generators can improve energy efficiency, as well as vehicle fuel economy. In the conventional structure, the hot-end of thermoelectric module is directly connected with the outer wall of the exhaust pipe, while the cold-end is connected with the water pipe’s outer wall of the vehicle engine cooling cycle. However, the variety of vehicle engine operating conditions leads to the instability of the hot-end temperature, which will reduce the generating efficiency of the thermoelectric modules and also shorten its service life. This research is on the basis of constructing a heat transfer oil circulation, and to study the action principles and implementation methods of it.