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Advanced diesel engines developed for the commercial market need to be adapted to the military requirements by OPERAS (Optimizing the injection pressure P, the Exhaust gas recirculation E, injection events Retard and/or Advance and the swirl ratio S). The different after treatment devices, already used or expected to be applied to diesel engines, require feed gases of appropriate properties for their efficient operation. To produce these gases some OPERAS are needed to control the diesel combustion process. Since military vehicles do not need the after treatment devices, the OPERAS of the commercial engines should be modified to meet the military requirements for high power density, better fuel economy, reduction of parasitic losses caused by the cooled EGR system, and reduction of invisible black and white smoke in the field.

The paper gives an evaluation of the performance of lap and shoulder belt restraint systems currently being used in American-built automobiles. Comparisons are made of the response characteristics of a volunteer, an anthropometric dummy, and a cadaver when subjected to identical collision environments while wearing a three or four point torso restraint system as occupants of the right front seat. Simulated frontal force barrier collisions in a modified automobile provided the realistic environment for the restraint system performance study. Human tolerances, interior vehicle geometry, and the interaction of the restrained occupant with the vehicle during the collision are reported in detail.

Two-dimensional pulse-laser Mie scattering visualization of the direct-injection gasoline fuel sprays and wall impingement processes was carried out inside a single-cylinder optically accessible engine under motoring condition. The injectors have been first characterized inside a pressurized chamber using identical technique, as well as high-speed microscopic visualization and phase Doppler measurement techniques. The effects of injector cone angle, location, and injection timings on the wall impingement processes were investigated. It was found that the fuel vaporization is not complete at the constant engine speed tested. Fuel spray droplets were observed to disperse wider in the motored engine when compared with an isothermal quiescent ambient conditions. The extent of wall-impingement varies significantly with the injector mounting position and spray cone angle; however, its effect can be reduced to some extent by optimizing the injection timing.

The direct injection spray-wall interactions were investigated experimentally using high-speed laser-sheet imaging, shadowgraphy, wetted footprints and phase Doppler interferometry techniques. A narrow-cone high-pressure swirl injector is used to inject iso-octane fuel onto a plate, at three different impact angles inside a pressurized chamber. Heated air and plate conditions were compared with unheated cases. Injection interval was also varied in the heated case to compare dry- and wet- wall impingement behaviors. High-speed macroscopic Mie-scattering images showed that presence of wall and air temperature has only minor effect on the bulk spray structure and penetration speed for the narrow-cone injector tested. The overall bulk motions of the spray plume and its spatial position at a given time are basically unaffected until a few millimeters before impacting the wall.

In the intelligent airbag system, the detection accuracy of occupant position is the precondition and plays a vital role to control airbag detonation time and inflated strength during the crash. Through accurately analyzing the seat surface pressure distributions of different occupant sitting position and types, an occupant position recognition approach which purely uses occupant pressure distribution information measured by seat pressure sensors is presented with the method of Support Vector Machine. In the end, the distribution samples with different occupant sitting position and types are used to train and test the recognition approach, and the good validity and accuracy are shown in the experiments.

Vehicle Longitudinal Control (VLC) algorithm is the basis function of automotive Cruise Control system. The main task of VLC is to achieve a longitudinal acceleration tracking controller, performance requirements of which include fast response and high tracking accuracy. At present, many control methods are used to implement vehicle longitudinal control. However, the existing methods are need to be improved because these methods need a high accurate vehicle dynamic model or a number of experiments to calibrate the parameters of controller, which are time consuming and costly. To overcome the difficulties of controller parameters calibration and accurate vehicle dynamic modeling, a vehicle longitudinal control algorithm based on iterative learning control (ILC) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm works based on the information of input and output of the system, so the method does not require a vehicle dynamics model.

Realistic vehicle fuel economy studies require real-world vehicle driving behavior data along with various factors affecting the fuel consumption. Such studies require data with various vehicles usages for prolonged periods of time. A project dedicated to collecting such data is an enormous and costly undertaking. Alternatively, we propose to utilize two publicly available vehicle travel survey data sets. One is Puget Sound Travel Survey collected using GPS devices in 484 vehicles between 2004 and 2006. Over 750,000 trips were recorded with a 10-second time resolution. The data were obtained to study travel behavior changes in response to time-and-location-variable road tolling. The other is Atlanta Regional Commission Travel Survey conducted for a comprehensive study of the demographic and travel behavior characteristics of residents within the study area.

The explosion of big data has created challenges for both cloud-based systems and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) in data collection and management. The same challenges are now being realized in developing databases for integrated sensors, streaming, real-time and on-demand services in AVs. With just one AV expecting to generate over 30 Terabytes of data a day, modern NoSQL databases provide opportunities to horizontally scale AV data seamlessly. NoSQL provides solutions designed to accommodate a wide variety of data models such as, key-value, document, column and graph databases. Key-value stores are by nature scalable, fast processing, and distribute horizontally. These databases are tasked with handling several data types including IoT, radar, lidar, ultra-sonic sensors, GPS, odometry, and sensor data while providing streaming and real-time services. NoSQL can store and utilize structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data necessary for multimedia storage needs.

Accurate sensing of road conditions is one of the necessary technologies for safe driving of intelligent vehicles. Compared with the structured road, the unstructured road has complex road conditions, and the response characteristics of vehicles under different road conditions are also different. Therefore, accurately identifying the road categories in front of the vehicle in advance can effectively help the intelligent vehicle timely adjust relevant control strategies for different road conditions and improve the driving comfort and safety of the vehicle. However, traditional road identification methods based on vehicle kinematics or dynamics are difficult to accurately identify the road conditions ahead of the vehicle in advance. Therefore, this paper proposes an unstructured road region detection and road classification algorithm based on machine vision to obtain the road conditions ahead.

The use of a soy-based diesel fuel (biodiesel) has potential advantages over the use of a conventional petroleum diesel fuel including: Reduced dependence on foreign petroleum Lowering of greenhouse gas emissions Less air pollution and related public health risks in urban areas A life cycle study performed by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Energy and Ecobalance (completed in May 1998) helped to quantify the environmental benefits of the “cradle-to-grave” production and use of biodiesel. The study showed, for example, that substituting 100% biodiesel for petroleum diesel in urban buses reduced the life cycle emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 78%. The study also pointed out some trade-offs of using biodiesel including increased life cycle hydrocarbon and NOx emissions.

Utilization of direct injection systems is one of the most promising technologies for fuel economy improvement for SI engine powered passenger cars. Engine performance is essentially influenced by the characteristics of the injection equipment. This paper will present CFD analyses of a swirl type GDI injector carried out with the Multiphase Module of AVL's FIRE/SWIFT CFD code. The simulations considered three phases (liquid fuel, fuel vapor, air) and mesh movement. Thus the transient behavior of the injector can be observed. The flow phenomena known from measurement and shown by previous simulation work [2, 7, 10, 11] were reproduced. In particular the simulations shown in this paper could explain the cause for the outstanding atomization characteristics of the swirl type injector, which are caused by cavitation in the nozzle hole.

EGR is a proven technology used to reduce NOx formation in both compression and spark ignition engines by reducing the combustion temperature. In order to further increase its efficiency the recirculated gases are subjected to cooling. However, this leads to a higher load on the cooling system of the engine, thus requiring a larger radiator. In the case of turbocharged engines the large variations of the pressures, especially in the exhaust manifold, produce a highly pulsating EGR flow leading to non-steady-state heat transfer in the cooler. The current research presents a method of determining the pulsating flow field and the instantaneous heat transfer in the EGR heat exchanger. The processes are simulated using the CFD code FIRE (AVL) and the results are subjected to validation by comparison with the experimental data obtained on a 2.5 liter, four cylinder, common rail and turbocharged diesel engine.

Lane-changing is a typical traffic scene effecting on road traffic with high request for reliability, robustness and driving comfort to improve the road safety and transportation efficiency. The development of connected autonomous vehicles with V2V communication provide more advanced control strategies to research of lane-changing. Meanwhile, four-wheel steering is an effective way to improve flexibility of vehicle. The front and rear wheels rotate in opposite direction to reduce the turning radius to improve the servo agility operation at the low speed while those rotate in same direction to reduce the probability of the slip accident to improve the stability at the high speed. Hence, this paper established Four-Wheel-Steering(4WS) vehicle dynamic model and quasi real lane-changing scenes to analyze the motion constraints of the vehicles.

Simulation has been considered as one of the key enablers on the development and testing for autonomous driving systems as in-vehicle and field testing can be very time-consuming, costly and often impossible due to safety concerns. Accurately modeling traffic, therefore, is critically important for autonomous driving simulation on threat assessment, trajectory planning, etc. Traditionally when modeling traffic, the motion of traffic vehicles is often considered to be deterministic and modeled based on its governing physics. However, the sensed or perceived motion of traffic vehicles can be full of errors or inaccuracy due to the inaccurate and/or incomplete sensing information. In addition, it is naturally true that any future trajectories are unknown. This paper proposes a novel modeling method on traffic considering its motion uncertainties, based on Gaussian process (GP).

Steer-by-wire System is a new conception for steering system, which eliminates those mechanical linkages between hand steering wheel and front wheels, and communicates among the driver and wheels by signals and controllers. All these facilities improve the safety and conformability of the vehicle system and get rid of the mechanical constricts. This paper proposed three vehicle stability control strategies, including front wheel control, yaw rate feedback control and yaw rate& acceleration feedback control. We compared these three control methods by simulation and simulator tests. We also studied the integrated control algorithm of Steer-by-Wire System and 4WS, and compared with 2WS for SBW and the classical 4WS.

The bending fatigue performance of high temperature (1050 °C) vacuum carburized Nb modified 8620 steel, with niobium additions of 0.02, 0.06 and 0.1 wt pct, was evaluated utilizing a modified Brugger specimen geometry. Samples were heated at two different rates (20 and 114 °C min-1) to the carburizing temperature resulting in different prior austenite grain structures that depended on the specific Nb addition and heating rate employed. At the lower heating rate, uniform fine grained prior austenite grain structures developed in the 0.06 and 0.1 Nb steels while a duplex grain structure with the presence of large (>200 μm grains) developed in the 0.02 Nb steel. At the higher heating rate the propensity for abnormal grain growth was highest in the 0.02 Nb steel and complete suppression of abnormal grain growth was achieved only with the 0.1 Nb steel.

Several types of energy absorbers were tested on a sled simulating a crash deceleration using instrumented, seated erect dummies and cadavers. The energy absorbers were mechanical load limiting devices which attenuated the impact by yielding or tearing of metal. Their principal effects were to reduce the peak deceleration sustained by the occupant with the expected reduction in restraint forces. Constant load level energy absorbers were found to be unattractive because they can easily “bottom out” causing forces and body strains which could be much higher than those without absorbers. Head accelerations were significantly reduced by the energy absorbers as well as some body strain. However, spinal strains in the cadaver were not significantly reduced. They appear to be not only a function of the peak deceleration level but also of the duration of the pulse.

High strain rate sheet tensile tests (up to 300s-1) and Ohio State University (OSU) formability tests (up to an estimated strain rate of 10s-1) were performed to examine the effect of strain rate on the mechanical properties and formability of five ferritic stainless steels: HIGH PERFORMANCE-10™ 409 (HP-10 409), ULTRA FORM® 409 (UF 409), HIGH PERFORMANCE-10™ 439 (HP-10 439), two thicknesses of 18 Cr-Cb™ stainless steel, all supplied by AK Steel, and Duracorr®, a ferrite-tempered martensite dual-phase stainless steel supplied by Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Tensile results show that increasing strain rate resulted in increases in yield stress, flow stress, and stress at instability for all alloys tested. In addition, increases in uniform and total elongation were also found for each of the five alloys.

The effects of austenite grain size on the bending fatigue crack initiation and fatigue performance of gas carburized, modified 4320 steels were studied. The steels were identical in composition except for phosphorus concentration which ranged between 0.005 and 0.031 wt%. Following the carburizing cycle, specimens were subjected to single and triple reheat treatments of 820°C for 30 minutes to refine the austenite grain structure, and oil quenched and tempered at 150°C. Specimens subjected to bending fatigue were characterized by light metallography to determine microstructure and grain size, X-ray analysis for retained austenite and residual stress measurements, and scanning electron microscopy for examination of fatigue crack initiation and propagation. The surface austenite grain size ranged from 15 μm in the as-carburized condition to 6 and 4 μm diameter grain size for the single and triple reheat conditions, respectively.

Under the borderline autoignition conditions experienced during cold-starting of diesel engines, the amount and composition of residual gases may play a deterministic role. Among the intermediate species produced by misfiring and partially firing cycles, formaldehyde (HCHO) is produced in significant enough amounts and is sufficiently stable to persist through the exhaust and intake strokes to kinetically affect autoignition of the following engine cycle. In this work, the effect of HCHO addition at various phases of autoignition of n-heptane-air mixtures is kinetically modeled. Results show that HCHO has a retarding effect on the earliest low-temperature heat release (LTHR) phase, largely by competition for hydroxyl (OH) radicals which inhibits fuel decomposition. Conversely, post-LTHR, the presence of HCHO accelerates the occurrence of high-temperature ignition.