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In this work a detailed model to simulate the transient behavior of catalytic converters is presented. The model is able to predict the unsteady and reacting flows in the exhaust ducts, by solving the system of conservation equations of mass, momentum, energy and transport of reacting chemical species. The en-gine and the intake system have not been included in the simulation, imposing the measured values of mass flow, gas temperature and chemical composition as a boundary condition at the inlet of the exhaust system. A detailed analysis of the diffusion stage triggering is proposed along with simplifications of the physics, finalized to the reduction of the calculation time. Submodels for water condensation and its following evaporation on the monolith surface have been taken into account as well as oxygen storage promoted by ceria oxides.

The adhesion control is the basic technology of active safety for the four-wheel driven EV. In this paper, a novel adhesion control method based on fuzzy logic control is proposed. The control system can maximize the adhesion force without road condition information and vehicle speed signal. Also, the regulation torque to prevent wheel slip is smooth and the vehicle driving comfort is greatly improved. For implementation, only the rotating speed of the driving wheel and the motor driving torque signals are needed, while the derived information of the wheel acceleration and the skid status are used. The simulation and road test results have shown that the adhesion control method is effective for preventing slip and lock on the slippery road condition.

The paper presents a method for the indoor testing of road vehicle suspension systems. A suspension is positioned on a rotating drum which is located in the Laboratory for the Safety of Transport at Politecnico di Milano. Special six-axis load cells have been designed and used for measuring the forces/moments acting at each suspension-chassis joints. The forces/moments, wheel accelerations, displacements are measured up to 100 Hz. Two different types of test can be performed. The tire/wheel unbalance effect on the suspension system behavior (Vibration and Harshness, VH) has been analyzed by testing the suspension system from zero to the vehicle maximum speed on a flat surface and by monitoring the forces transmitted to the chassis. In the second kind of test, the suspension system has been excited as the wheel passes over different cleats fixed on the drum.

A comprehensive research is presented aiming at assessing the ride comfort of subjects seated into road or off-road vehicles. Although many papers and books have appeared in the literature, many issues on ride comfort are still to be understood, in particular, the paper investigates the mutual effects of the posture and the vibration caused mostly from road unevenness. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, a mathematical model of a seated subject is validated by means of actual measurements on human subjects riding on a car. Such measurements refer to the accelerations acting at the subject/seat interface (vertical acceleration at the seat cushion and horizontal acceleration at the seat back). A proper dummy is used to derive the seat stiffness and damping.

A disc-pad system is established to study impacts of surface topography on brake squeal from the perspective of statistical analysis. Firstly, surface topographies of brake disc and pad are precisely measured on the scale of micron and are statistically analyzed with a three-dimensional evaluation system. Secondly, the finite element model of brake disc and pad without surface topographies is created and verified through component free modal tests. Thereby the valid brake squeal model for complex modal analysis is built with ABAQUS. An effective method is developed to apply interface topographies to the smooth contact model, which consequently establishes sixty brake squeal models with topographies. Thirdly, impacts of surface topography on brake squeal are studied through comparison and statistical analysis of prediction results with and without topographies.

A 2 DOF nonlinear dynamic model of the automotive wiper system is established. Complex eigenvalues are calculated based on the complex modal theory, and the system stability as well as its dependence on wiping velocity is analyzed. Bifurcation characteristics of frictional self-excited vibration and stick-slip vibration relative to wiping velocity are studied through numerical analysis. Research of nonlinear vibration characteristics under various wiping velocities is conducted by means of phase trajectories, Poincaré map and frequency spectrum. The pervasive stick-slip vibration during wiping is confirmed, and its temporal and spatial distributions are analyzed by way of time history and contour map. Duty ratio of stick vibration and statistics of scraping residual are introduced as quantitative indexes for wiping effect evaluation. Results indicate that the negative slop of frictional-velocity characteristic is the root cause of system instability.

During a car launch, the driving torque from driveline acts on brake disk, and may lead the pad to slip against the disk. Especially with slow brake pedal release, there is still brake torque applies on the disk, which will retard the rotation of disk, and under certain conditions, the disk and pad may stick again, so the reciprocated stick and slip can induce the noise and vibration, which can be transmitted to a passenger by both tactile and aural paths, this phenomenon is defined as brake groan. In this paper, we propose a nonlinear dynamics model of brake for bidirectional, and with 7 Degrees of Freedom (DOFs), and phase locus and Lyapunov Second Method are utilized to study the mechanism of groan. Time-frequency analysis method then is adopted to analyze the simulation results, meanwhile a test car is operated under corresponding conditions, and the test signals are sampled and then processed to acquire the features.

Detailed chemistry and turbulence-chemistry interaction need to be properly taken into account for a realistic combustion simulation of IC engines where advanced combustion modes, multiple injections and stratified combustion involve a wide range of combustion regimes and require a proper description of several phenomena such as auto-ignition, flame stabilization, diffusive combustion and lean premixed flame propagation. To this end, different approaches are applied and the most used ones rely on the well-stirred reactor or flamelet assumption. However, well-mixed models do not describe correctly flame structure, while unsteady flamelet models cannot easily predict premixed flame propagation and triple flames. A possible alternative for them is represented by transported probability density functions (PDF) methods, which have been applied widely and effectively for modeling turbulent reacting flows under a wide range of combustion regimes.

A new multi-zone model for the simulation of HCCI engine is here presented. The model includes laminar and turbulent diffusion and conduction exchange between the zones and the last improvements on the numerical aspects. Furthermore, a new strategy for the zone discretization is presented, which allows a better description of the near-wall zones. The aim of the work is to provide a fast and reliable model for carrying out chemical analysis with detailed kinetic schemes. A preliminary sensitivity analysis allows to verify that 10 zones are a convenient number for a good compromise between the computational effort and the description accuracy. The multi-zone predictions are then compared with the CFD ones to find the effective turbulence parameters, with the aim to describe the near-wall phenomena, both in a reactive and non-reactive cases.

In this work a multilevel CFD analysis have been applied for the design of an intake air-box with improved characteristics of noise reduction and fluid dynamic response. The approaches developed and applied for the optimization process range from the 1D to fully 3D CFD simulation, exploring hybrid approaches based on the integration of a 1D model with quasi-3D and 3D tools. In particular, the quasi-3D strategy is exploited to investigate several configurations, tailoring the best trade-off between noise abatement at frequencies below 1000 Hz and optimization of engine performances. Once the best configuration has been defined, the 1D-3D approach has been adopted to confirm the prediction carried out by means of the simplified approach, studying also the impact of the new configuration on the engine performances.

A passive thermal management system (TMS) using composite phase change material (PCM) for large-capacity, rectangular lithium-ion batteries is designed. A battery module consisting of six Li-ion cells connected in series was investigated as a basic unit. The passive TMS for the module has three configurations according to the contact area between cells and the composite PCM, i.e., surrounding, front-contacted and side-contacted schemes. Firstly, heat generation rate of the battery cell was calculated using the Bernardi equation based on experimentally measured heat source terms (i.e. the internal resistance and the entropy coefficient). Physical and thermal properties such as density, phase change temperature, latent heat and thermal conductivity of the composite PCM were also obtained by experimental methods. Thereafter, thermal response of the battery modules with the three TMS configurations was simulated using 3D finite element analysis (FEA) modeling in ANSYS Fluent.

This paper presents a nonlinear control approach to achieve good performances in vehicle path following and collision avoidance when the vehicle is driving under cruise highway conditions. Nonlinear model predictive control (NLMPC) is adopted to achieve online trajectory control based on a simplified vehicle model. GMRES/Continuation algorithm is used to solve the online optimization problem. Simulations show that the proposed controller is capable of tracking the desired path as well as avoiding the obstacles.

Swirling flows are very dominant in applied technical problems, especially in IC engines, and their prediction requires rather sophisticated modeling. An adaptive low-pass filtering procedure for the modeled turbulent length and time scales is derived and applied to Menter' original k - ω SST turbulence model. The modeled length and time scales are compared to what can potentially be resolved by the computational grid and time step. If the modeled scales are larger than the resolvable scales, the resolvable scales will replace the modeled scales in the formulation of the eddy viscosity; therefore, the filtering technique helps the turbulence model to adapt in accordance with the mesh resolution and the scales to capture.

During the launch of a car, severe torsional vibration sometimes may occur in its driveline due to somewhat the slipping of the clutch, its intuitive sense for an occupant is the longitudinal vibration of the vehicle, referred to as the launch shudder whose characteristic frequency is from 5 to 25 Hz generally. As the main vibration sources of the driveline and its crucial nonlinear components, the variable stiffness and backlash of the gear meshing are considered, their impacts on the launch shudder are analyzed in this paper. Conformal mapping, finite element method and regression method etc. are the main approaches to calculate the variable meshing stiffness of a gear pair. If this stiffness is get, it can usually be substituted for its approximate analytical expression, just with finite harmonic terms, in Fourier Series form into Ordinary Differential Equations(ODEs) to calculate the vehicle responses with its nonlinearity considered.

In the next years, the upcoming emission legislations are expected to introduce further restrictions on the admittable level of pollutants from vehicles measured on homologation cycles and real drive tests. In this context, the strict control of pollutant emissions at the cold start will become a crucial point to comply with the new regulation standards. This will necessarily require the implementation of novel strategies to speed-up the light-off of the reactions occurring in the after-treatment system, since the cold start conditions are the most critical one for cumulative emissions. Among the different possible technological solutions, this paper focuses on the evaluation of the potential of a burner system, which is activated before the engine start. The hypothetical burner exploits the lean combustion of an air-gasoline mixture to generate a high temperature gas stream which is directed to the catalyst section promoting a fast heating of the substrate.

Modeling combustion of transportation fuels remains a difficult task due to the extremely large number of species constituting commercial gasoline and diesel. However, for this purpose, multi-component surrogate fuel models with a reduced number of key species and dedicated reaction subsets can be used to reproduce the physical and chemical traits of diesel and gasoline, also allowing to perform CFD calculations. Recently, a detailed surrogate fuel kinetic model, named C3 mechanism, was developed by merging high-fidelity sub-mechanisms from different research groups, i.e. C0-C4 chemistry (NUI Galway), linear C6-C7 and iso-octane chemistry (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and monocyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (MAHs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) (ITV-RWTH Aachen and CRECK modelling Lab-Politecnico di Milano).

The energy management strategies (EMS) for hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) have a great impact on the fuel economy (FE). The Pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP) has been proved to be a viable control strategy for HEV. The optimal costate of the PMP control can be determined by the given information of the driving conditions. Since the full knowledge of future driving conditions is not available, this paper proposed a dynamic optimization method for PMP costate without the prediction of the driving cycle. It is known that the lower fuel consumption the method yields, the more efficiently the engine works. The selection of costate is designed to make the engine work in the high efficiency range. Compared with the rule-based control, the proposed method by the principle of Hamiltonian, can make engine working points have more opportunities locating in the middle of high efficiency range, instead of on the boundary of high efficiency range.

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.

CuO-water nanofluids was utilized as heat transfer medium in the cooling system of the diesel engine. By using CFD-Fluent software, for 0.5%, 1%, 3% and 5% mass concentration of nanofluids, 3-dimensional numerical simulation about flow and heat transfer process in the cooling system of engine was actualized. According to stochastic particle tracking in turbulent flow, for solid-liquid two phase flow discrete phase, the moving track of nanoparticles was traced. By this way, for CuO nanoparticles of different mass concentration nanofliuds in the cooling jacket of diesel engine, the results of the concentration distribution, velocity distribution, internal energy variation, resident time, total heat transfer and variation of total pressure reduction between inlet and outlet were ascertained.

In recent years, the increase of gasoline fuel injection pressure is a way to improve thermal efficiency and lower engine-out emissions in GDI homogenous combustion concept. The challenge of controlling particulate formation as well in mass and number concentrations imposed by emissions regulations can be pursued improving the mixture preparation process and avoiding mixture inhomogeneity with ultra-high injection pressure values up to 100 MPa. The increase of the fuel injection pressure in GDI homogeneous systems meets the demand for increased injector static flow, while simultaneously improves the spray atomization and mixing characteristics with consequent better combustion performance. Few studies quantify the effects of high injection pressure on transient gasoline spray evolution. The aim of this work was to simulate with OpenFOAM the spray morphology of a commercial gasoline injected in a constant volume vessel by a prototypal GDI injector.