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The linear internal combustion engine-linear generator integrated system (LICELGIS) is an innovative structure as a range-extender for the hybrid vehicles, which contains two opposed free piston engines and one linear generator between them. The LICELGIS is a promising power package due to its high power density and multi-fuel flexibility. In the combustion process of linear engines, the top dead center (TDC) position is not stable in different cycles, which significantly affects system operations. Otherwise, pistons move away from the TDC with high-speed because of the tremendous explosive force, which incurs the short residence time of pistons around the TDC and rapid decrease of in-cylinder temperature, pressure and the combustion efficiency. In order to address this problem, a scientific simulation model which includes dynamic and thermodynamic models, is established and a combustion optimization control strategy is proposed.

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.

By changing the top-land radial clearance, this paper presents the effect of the piston crevice on the transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle. At the same time, the transient cylinder pressure and instantaneous crankshaft speed of the engine were measured and recorded. The results show that increasing 50% crevice volume leads to 25% increase of HC emissions in the lean region and 18% increase of HC emissions in the rich region, however, the 50% increase of crevice volume contributes to 32% decease of HC emissions in the stable combustion region. For LPG SI engine, the HC emissions of the first firing cycle during cold start are relatively low in a wide range of the excess air ratio.

The effectiveness of after-treatment systems depends on the exhaust gas temperature, which is low during cold-start. As a result, Euro III, Euro IV and FTP75 require that the emissions tests include exhaust from the beginning of cold start. It is proved that 50%∼80% of HC and CO emissions are emitted during the cold start and the amount of unburned fuel from the crevices during starting is much higher than that under warmed engine conditions. The piston crevices is the most part of combustion chamber crevices, and results of mathematical simulations show that the piston crevice contribution to HC emissions is expected to increase during cold engine operation. Based on the transient HC test data and the double zone combustion model, this paper presents the study of the crevice HC Mechanism of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle.

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.

For an innovative opposed-piston diesel engine (OPE) with two-stroke operation mode, it attracted even more attentions than ever in some developed countries all around the world, attributed to the unique advantages of higher power density that conducive to downsize IC engine, as well as the potential of further reducing fuel consumption for outstanding thermal efficiency. To achieve fast practical application and ensure the feasibility in concept design stage, the performance characteristic of OPE crankshaft system was investigated, and thus a theoretical analytic model of crankshaft system in an OP2S (Opposed-piston two stroke) engine was established. The effects of all structural design variables on averaged output torque of OPE crankshaft were analyzed, respectively. It was found that the initial crank angle difference between inner crank web and outer crank web was considered as a most critical contributor to boost the averaged torque output than other design variables.

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.

For an in-line diesel engine with four cylinder operating in four-stroke mode, the second-order reciprocating inertia forces generally cannot be well balanced with direct approach. The unbalanced second-order inertia forces are the main reason to cause vibration and noise in a diesel engine within low frequency range. The more superior tone quality for modern diesel engine has been expected even for bus application all the time, and there are tougher requirements for truck noise in developed countries, i.e. in Europe and USA. In present research a unique crankshaft system configuration was proposed, which including opposed piston, inner and outer connecting rod, and crankshaft but running in two-stroke mode, to eliminate the second-order inertia force considerably rather than by adding an extra balance shaft mechanism.

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.

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.

BBW (Brake-by-wire) can increase the vehicle safety performance due to high control accuracy and fast response speed. As one solution of BBW, the novel Integrated-electro-hydraulic brake system (I-EHB) is proposed, which consists of electro-hydraulic booster and hydraulic pressure control unit. The electro-hydraulic booster is activated by an electric motor that driving linear motion mechanism to directly produce the master cylinder pressure. With electro-hydraulic booster as an actuator, the hydraulic pressure control problem is a key issue. Most literatures deal with the pressure control issue based on the feedback pressure signal measured by pressure sensor. As far as the authors are aware, none of the proposed techniques takes into account the pressure sensor unequipped BBW. In this paper, there is no pressure feedback signal, but there is only position feedback signal measured by position sensor for control law design.

Vertical excitations from obstacles on public road are typical and likely to increase vehicle interior vibration through major paths of wheel spindle-suspension-body. A new transient transfer path analysis (TTPA) methodology is presented combining the substructure reverse matrix method based on FRFs with operational excitation. Additionally, a new kind of experimental method is applied to solve an engineering problem and also validates the TTPA theory above. There are three steps in all. Firstly, vibration in Z direction of wheel spindle was collected in one proving ground and represented on MTS 320 road simulator bench after many times of iteration of piston signals. This procedure guarantees excitation decoupling in one certain direction so it leads to accurate frequency response functions (FRFs) under transient shocking excitation. Secondly, the new transient transfer path analysis approach was used to calculate vibration contribution of wheel-suspension-body.

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).

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.

Fuel cell vehicle commercialization and mass production are challenged by the durability of fuel cells. In order to research the durability of fuel cell stack, it is necessary to carry out the related durability test. The performance prediction of fuel cell stack can be based on a short time durability test result to accurately predict the performance of the fuel cell stack, so it can ensure the timeliness of the test results and reduce the cost of test. In this paper, genetic algorithm-BP neural network (GA-BPNN) is proposed to modeling automotive fuel cell stack to predict the performance of it. Based on the strong global searching ability of genetic algorithm, the initial weights and threshold selection of neural networks are optimized to solve the shortcoming that the random selection of the initial weights and thresholds of BP neural network which can easily lead to the local optimal value.

This paper presents a novel lumped parameter model(LPM) and its parameter identification method for the hydraulic engine mount(HEM) with a suspended decoupler. In the new model the decoupler membrane’s variable stiffness caused by being contact with the metallic cage is considered. Therefore, the decoupler membrane in the model can be taken as a spring. As a result, two parameters of the decoupler’s variable stiffness and the equivalent piston area are added. Then the finite element method is employed to analyze the suspended decoupler membrane’s variable stiffness characteristics under the contact state with the metallic cage. A piecewise polynomial is used to fit the decoupler membrane’s variable stiffness. To guarantee the symmetry of the stiffness, the polynomial only keeps the odd power coefficients.