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To overcome the shortcomings of subjective evaluation, there have been several studies to examine the correlations between subjective and objective evaluations of on-center steering feel, and some useful results are obtained. However, it is still not clear how to design the steering characteristic based on the correlations. In this paper, we propose a methodology of identifying the optimal on-center steering force characteristic based on the correlations between subjective and objective evaluations. Firstly, significant correlations between subjective and objective evaluations regarding on-center steering feel are established and verified. These verified correlations are then used to design the steering force characteristic. With desired ratings of the subjective evaluation items set as optimization goals, the ideal values of objective evaluation indices are obtained by use of an optimal design method.

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.

The conducted emissions of DC motors have been a very important content when testing electromagnetic noise. It has certain practical guiding significance to optimize and improve the motor in the design stage through the simulation of conducted emissions circuit level. The existing literature research shows that the simulation results can not reflect the test results of the conducted emissions of the motor well because it is difficult to accurately model the armature winding and the commutation process of the motor in the electromagnetic simulation of the conducted emissions circuit level of the DC brush motor. In this paper, an electromagnetic simulation modeling method for conducted emissions of DC motor is proposed. The circuit model established in the PSPICE can simulate the actual conducted emissions values of DC motor by the method.

Crashworthiness is one of the most important performances of vehicles, and the front rails are the main crash energy absorption parts during the frontal crashing process. In this paper, the front rail was simplified to a thin-walled beam with a cross section of single-hat which was made of steel and aluminum. And the two boards of it were connected by riveting without rivets. In order to optimize its crashworthiness, the thickness (t), radius (R) and the rivet spacing (d) were selected as three design variables, and its specific energy absorption was the objective while the average impact force was the constraint. Considering the error of manufacturing and measurements, the parameters σs and Et of the steel were selected as the uncertainty variables to improve the design reliability. The algorithm IP-GA and the approximate model-RBF (Radial Basis Function) were applied in this nonlinear uncertainty optimization.

The Automatic Parking System (APS) is consisted of environmental perception, path planning and path following. As one of the key technologies in APS, path following module controls the lateral movement of the vehicle during the parking process. A mature path following module should meet all the performance indexes of high precision, fast convergence, convenient tuning and good passenger comfort. However, the current path following control methods can only meet parts of the performance indexes, instead of all. In order to satisfy all the performance indexes above, a path following control method based on Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the linearization of the non-linear vehicle kinematic model was done to establish a linear system of the path following error. Secondly, LQR optimal control was used to achieve the closed-loop control of this linear system to guarantee its stability and fast convergence property.

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.

With the rapidly developing automotive industry and stricter environmental protection laws and regulations, lightweight materials, advanced manufacturing processes and structural optimization methods are widely used in body design. Therefore, in order to evaluate and improve the pedestrian protection during a collision, this paper presents an impact simulation modeling and structural optimization method for a sport utility vehicle engine hood made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP). Head injury criterion (HIC) was used to evaluate the performance of the hood in this regard. The inner panel and the outer panel of CFRP hood were discretized by shell elements in LS_DYNA. The Mat54-55 card was used to define the mechanical properties of the CFRP hood. In order to reduce the computational costs, just the parts contacted with the hood were modeled. The simulations were done in the prescribed 30 impact points.

Gradient based topology optimization method is difficult used to optimization of crashworthiness structures due to the expensive computational cost of sensitivity analysis and complex nonlinear behaviors (geometric nonlinearity, material nonlinearity and contact nonlinearity) of structures during a collision. Equivalent static loads (ESLs) method is one of the methods for nonlinear dynamic response optimization. However, this method ignores the material nonlinearity. Thus this paper proposes an improved topology optimization method for crashworthiness structure based on a modified ESLs method. A new calculation of ESLs considering material nonlinearity is proposed. The improved ESLs method is employed to transform the nonlinear dynamic response optimization into a nonlinear static response optimization with multiple load cases. Each element in the design domain is assigned with a design variable.

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.

This paper presents a theoretical study of a finite hybrid piezoelectric phononic crystal (PC) beam with shunting circuits. The vibration transmissibility method (TM) is developed for the finite system. The uniform and non-uniform configurations of the resonators, piezoelectric patches and shunting circuits are respectively considered. The properties of the vibration attenuation of the hybrid PC beam undergoing bending vibration are investigated and quantified. It is shown that the proper relaxation of the periodicity of the PC is conducive to forming a broad vibration attenuation region. The hybrid piezoelectric PC combines the purely mechanical PC with the piezoelectric PC and provides more tunable mechanisms for the target band-gap. Taking the structural and circuit parameters into account, the design of experiments (DOE) method and the multi-objective genetic optimization method are employed to improve the vibration attenuation and meet the lightweight demand of the attachments.

There are a large number of uncertainties in engineering design, and the accumulated uncertainties will enlarge the overall failure probability of the structure system. Therefore, structural design considering uncertainties has good guiding significance for improving the reliability of engineering structures. To address this issue, the dynamic-static structural topology optimization is established and reliability-based topology optimization with decoupling format is conducted in this study. The design point which satisfying the constraint of the target reliability indicator is obtained according to the reliability indicators of the first-order reliability method, and the uncertain design variables are modified into a deterministic variable according to the sensitivity information.

The present work discusses a novel oxy-fuel combustion cycle utilized in compression ignition internal combustion engine. The most prominent feature of this cycle is that the air intake is replaced by oxygen; therefore nitric oxide (NOX) emission is eliminated. The enrichment of oxygen leads to higher flame speed and mass fraction consumption rate; on the other hand, the high concentration of oxygen presented during combustion will result in intense pressure rise rate which may cause severe damage to engine hardware. As water injection is already utilized in gasoline engine to control knocking, the utilization of water injection in optimizing oxy-fuel combustion process has been tested in this study. To understand the relationship between water injection strategy and cycle efficiency, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were carried out. The model was carefully calibrated with the experimental results; the errors were controlled within 3%.

The price of fossil fuels and the increasing inexorable energy crisis have become vital issues for everyone. Tongji University EconoPower Racing Team was established to participate in the “Honda EconoPower Cup” annually. Every contestant in the competition must finish a certain distance in the fixed time, with the gasoline supplied by the committee. After that the committee will measure the fuel consumption of every team and calculate the distance per liter fuel (the farther the better) to determine the champion. In order to enhance the EP vehicle's achievement we've made some improvements, such as framework, body, engine's optimization and so on. In this passage we mainly state some details of our research approaches in framework, steering, transmission, shape and driving strategy. The main technologies were: friction reduction, lightweight, enhancement of power train efficiency, tire selection and driving strategy.

To solve the problem of serious roller wear and improve the smoothness of the sliding door motion process, the rigid-flexible coupling multi-body model of the vehicle sliding door was built in ADAMS. Force boundary conditions of the model were determined to meet the speed requirement of monitoring point and time requirement of door opening-closing process according to the bench test specification. The results of dynamic simulation agreed well with that of test so the practicability and credibility of the model was verified. In the optimization of the ride comfort of the sliding door, two different schemes were proposed. The one was to optimize the position of hinge pivots and the other was to optimize the structural parameters of the middle guide. The impact load of lead roller on middle guide, the curvature of the motion trajectory and angular acceleration of the sliding door centroid were taken as optimization objectives.

Beamforming techniques are widely used today in aeroacoustic wind tunnels to identify wind noise sources generated by interaction between incoming flow and the test object. In this study, a planar spiral microphone array with 120 channels was set out-of-flow at 1:1 aeroacoustic wind tunnel of Shanghai Automotive Wind Tunnel Center (SAWTC) to test exterior wind noise sources of a production car. Simultaneously, 2 reference microphones were set in vehicle interior to record potential sound source signal near the left side view mirror triangle and the signal of driver’s ear position synchronously. In addition, a spherical array with 48 channels was set inside the vehicle to identify interior noise sources synchronously as well. With different correlation methods and an advanced algorithm CLEAN-SC, the ranking of contributions of vehicle exterior wind noise sources to interested interior noise locations was accomplished.

Path following controller of a six-wheel skid-steering vehicle is designed. The vehicle speed is controlled through engine speed control and the lateral vehicle steering is controlled through hydraulic braking on each side. Contrary to the common approaches considering non-holonomic constraints, vehicle dynamic characteristics and nonlinear characteristics of tire are considered. A hierarchical control structure is applied in this vehicle control system. The kinematic controller works out the reference yaw rate and reference vehicle speed. And a robust dynamic controller tracks the reference signal. In addition, the dynamic controller takes actuator ability into account.

Boosting and downsizing is the trend of future gasoline engine technology. For the turbocharged engines, the actuation of intake boosting pressure is very important to the performance output. In this paper, a GT-Power simulation model is built based on a 1.5 L turbocharged gasoline engine as the research object. The accuracy of model has been verified through the bench test data. Then it is conducted with numerical simulation to analyze the effect of wastegate diameter on the engine performance, including power output and fuel economy. Mainly the wastegate diameter is optimized under full engine operating conditions. Finally an optimal MAP of wastegate diameter is drawn out through interpolation method. By the transmission relationship between wastegate and actuator, a wastegate control MAP for electric actuated wastegate can be obtained.

Generally, the gear rattle noise prediction models are composed of the mass and stiffness elements. The proposals are about the gear inertia or backlash and the shaft inertia or stiffness, but there are many detailed designs in the same inertia, stiffness or backlash conditions. Therefore, these proposals can’t guide detailed designs. These models only investigate the rattle in the rotating degree, and ignore rattle contribution in the radical and axial directions. Those prediction models only consider one or several factors which affect the rattle noise performance. It is difficult to predict the influence of individual factor and multi-factors coupling on the gear rattle noise in a rattle simulation model.

For sensing system, the trustworthiness of the variant sensors is the crucial point when dealing with advanced driving assistant system application. In this paper, an approach to a hybrid camera-radar application of vehicle tracking is presented, able to meet the requirement of such demand. Most of the time, different types of commercial sensors available nowadays specialize in different situations, such as the ability of offering a wealth of detailed information about the scene for the camera or the powerful resistance to the severe weather for the millimeter-wave (MMW) radar. The detection and tracking in different sensors are usually independent. Thus, the work here that combines the variant information provided by different sensors is indispensable and worthwhile. For the real-time requirement of merging the measurement of automotive MMW radar in high speed, this paper first proposes a fast vehicle tracking algorithm based on image perceptual hash encoding.

Electromechanical Braking System (EMB) stops the wheel by motor and related enforce mechanism to drive braking pads to clamp the friction plate. It is compact in sized as well as faster in response, which solves the issue of potential leakage and slows response of traditional hydraulic brake system. The institutions at home and abroad have put forward all kinds of new structural schemes of EMB. At present, there are various EMB structural schemes, but the analysis and evaluation of these schemes are relatively few. In this paper, on the basis of a large number of research, the EMB actuator is modular decomposed according to function ,then the parametric 3D model library of each function module is established. According to brake requirements of the target vehicle, a development platform is set up to match EMB actuator structure scheme quickly.