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Adhesive bonding has many applications in the automotive industry. The single-lapped bonded joint is the most typically used among various bonding types. This paper presents experimental research for determining the strain field of the single-lapped joint under tensile loading. The materials for the joint are epoxy-based structural adhesive and low-carbon electrolytic zinc steel plate. In the study, a DIC (digital image correlation) system was adopted to measure the strain distribution of the bonded joint during a tensile test. The bonded steel coupons in the tensile test were prepared according to the ASTM standard. During the measurement, images of the coupon joint were taken before and after the deformation process. Then the DIC system measured the strain of bonded joint by comparing two consecutive images. The measured data from the DIC was compared to data taken simultaneously from a traditional extensometer.

In order to solve the problem that in the traditional trilateral positioning algorithm, the final positioning error is large when there is a certain error in the measured three-sided distance, a UWB positioning algorithm based on Back Propagation (BP) neural network is proposed. The algorithm utilizes the fast learning characteristic and the ability of approximating any non-linear mapping of neural network, and realizes the location of the mobile label through the TOA measurement value provided by the base station and the BP neural network. By comparing the traditional trilateral positioning algorithm, the BP neural network algorithm based on four distance inputs and the BP neural network algorithm based on four distance inputs with trilateral positioning coordinates, it can be seen that the positioning error of traditional trilateral positioning algorithm is 30 cm, and the positioning error of the positioning algorithm based on the BP neural network proposed in this paper is 10 cm.

Research studies have suggested that changes to the ignition system are required to generate a more robust flame kernel in order to secure the ignition process for the future advanced high efficiency spark-ignition (SI) engines. In a typical inductive ignition system, the spark discharge is initiated by a transient high-power electrical breakdown and sustained by a relatively low-power glow process. The electrical breakdown is characterized as a capacitive discharge process with a small quantity of energy coming mainly from the gap parasitic capacitor. Enhancement of the breakdown is a potential avenue effectively for extending the lean limit of SI engine. In this work, the effect of high-power capacitive spark discharge on the early flame kernel growth of premixed methane-air mixtures is investigated through electrical probing and optical diagnosis.

Automotive radar is an important environment perception sensor for advance driving assistance system. It can detect objects around the vehicle with high accuracy and it works in all bad weathers. For traditional automotive radar, it cannot measure the objects’ height. Thus, a manhole cover on the road surface or a guideboard high above the road would be taken erroneously as a non-moving car. In such cases, the adaptive cruise system would decelerate or stop the vehicle erroneously and make the driver uncomfortable. A 3D automotive radar with two-dimensional electronic scanning can measure the targets’ height as well as the targets’ azimuth angle. This paper presents a 79 GHz ultra-wide band automotive 3D imaging radar. Due to the 4 GHz wide bandwidth, the range resolution of this radar can be as small as 3.75 cm.

As a type of alternative fuel, biodiesel has advantages in reducing greenhouse gases and ensuring energy security. Compared with petroleum diesel, biodiesel has different lower calorific value, oxygen content and octane number that would raise problems when the unoptimized common rail diesel engine is fueled with biodiesel or its petroleum diesel blends. Among these problems, decreasing full load torque output and increasing NOx and BSFC are significantly important. Fuel injection parameter calibration and optimization experiments are carried out in an in-line 6-cylinder 8.82 liter turbocharged and intercooled common rail diesel, which is equipped with Denso ECD-U2 fuel injection system, SCR (Selective catalytic reduction) and DPF (diesel particulate filter). To avoid after-treatment apparatus' coupling influence and re-calibration, emission measure point is set in front of catalysts. The experiment adopts B20 biodiesel as test fuel.

A novel reciprocating engine version of oxy-fuel combustion cycle combined with water direct injection (known as internal combustion rankine cycle) is presented in this paper. Water is injected near top dead center to control the reaction rate of the oxy-fuel mixture, as well as the peak in-cylinder temperature. The evaporation of the water mist will increase the mass of working gas inside the cylinder, and enhances the thermo efficiency and MEP. Moreover, the injected water is heated up through heat exchangers by both engine coolant and exhaust gas, and the waste heat is effectively recovered this way. This study investigates the combustion and emission characteristics of ICRC under different engine loads based on a single-cylinder, air-cooled SI engine fueled with propane. An extra diesel injector is employed to inject water with high injection temperature (160°C).

Internal combustion Rankine cycle (ICRC) engine uses oxygen instead of air as oxidant during the combustion process, therefore totally eliminates the emission of NOx. CO2 could be captured after separated from the exhaust gas, the latter are mainly water vapor and CO2, through condensation at a relatively low price, and thus an ultra-low emission working cycle is achieved. Moreover, water is heated up by exhaust gas and injected into the cylinder during the combustion process to control combustion temperature, and evaporation of the water mist would increase working fluid inside the cylinder, therefore enhance indicated thermal efficiency. This study investigates the combustion characteristics of a quasi ICRC on a single-cylinder SI engine fueled with propane. Gas mixture of O2/CO2 is employed to simulate EGR in order to control in-cylinder temperature.

This paper presents the simulation of in-cylinder stratified mixture formation, spray motion, combustion and emissions in a four-stroke and four valves direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine with a pent-roof combustion chamber by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The Extended Coherent Flame Combustion Model (ECFM), implemented in the AVL-Fire codes, was employed. The key parameters of spray characteristics related to computing settings, such as skew angle, cone angle and flow per pulse width with experimental measurements were compared. The numerical analysis is mainly focused on how the tumble flow ratio and geometry of piston bowls affect the motion of charge/spray in-cylinder, the formation of stratified mixture and the combustion and emissions (NO and CO₂) for the wall-guided stratified-charge spark-ignition DISI engine.

Spray characteristics and spray wall-impingement events are the key factors for the direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines, affecting fuel/air mixture preparation and its combustion process. Thus, the spray characteristics of a multi-hole injector for DISI engines, such as spray tip penetration and spray cone angle were investigated in an optical chamber employing the high-speed shadow photography. Furthermore, the effects of the injection pressure, ambient pressure and piston top shape on the impinging spray development were studied in the optical chamber, when the impinging distance is 26.1 mm, corresponding to about 60 CAD ATDC. In addition, the SMD and wall film thickness of the spray impinging on the piston top were studied by means of CFD technique. The results showed that the ambient pressure had the greater effect on the changes of the spray penetration and spray cone angle than the injection pressure.

Real-time and reliable perception of the surrounding environment is an important prerequisite for advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) and automatic driving. And vision-based detection plays a significant role in environment perception for automatic vehicles. Although deep convolutional neural networks enable efficient recognition of various objects, it has difficulty in accurately detecting special vehicles, rocks, road pile, construction site, fence and so on. In this work, we address the task of traffic scene understanding with semantic image segmentation. Both driveable area and the classification of object can be attained from the segmentation result. First, we define 29 classes of objects in traffic scenarios with different labels and modify the Deeplab V2 network. Then in order to reduce the running time, MobileNet architecture is applied to generate the feature map instead of the original models.

Effects of biodiesel fuel on nucleation mode particles were studied on a direct injection, high pressure common-rail diesel engine for passenger cars. Particle number and size distribution of the diesel engine were obtained using an Engine Exhaust Particle Sizer (EEPS). The base petroleum diesel, three different blend ratios of petroleum diesel/biodiesel (10%, 20% and 50% v/v biodiesel blend ratios), and the pure biodiesel fuel (obtained and converted from Jatropha seed in China) (B0, B10, B20, B50 and B100 fuels) were tested without engine modification. Experiments were performed on a series of engine operating conditions. The particle number size distribution of the engine shows unimodal or bimodal log-normal distribution. With the biodiesel blend ratios increasing, the number of nucleation mode particles increases at all test engine operating conditions and accumulation mode particles decreases at most engine operating conditions.

Accurate control of both the timing and quantity of injection events is critical for engine performance and emissions. The most serious problem which reduces the accuracy of the control operation in such systems is a time delay of the responsiveness for the opening and closing operation of the electromagnetic valve. Modern electronic control systems should be capable of driving high speed solenoid injectors at a very fast switch frequency with high efficiency and acceptable power requirements. In this paper, the dynamic characteristic of a high speed servo-hydraulic solenoid injector for diesel engine, with different driving circuits and control methods, is investigated. A pre-energizing control strategy based on a dual power supply is applied to speed up the opening response time of the injectors.

An experimental study is presented on the evaporation of diluted droplet-laden two-phase jet flows within a heated air channel co-flow. In this study, n-heptane is pre-atomized by an ultrasonic nozzle to produce droplet cluster with a median diameter of about15μm, and a continuous cold air flow is applied to carry the fuel droplet cluster to emerge from a nozzle tube, producing a free turbulent jet of droplet stream. The droplet stream is then introduced as a central jet into a square-shaped channel with heated air co-flow for evaporation investigations. With flexibilities of the initial properties of droplet stream and surrounding conditions of channel flow, the axial evolution of droplet size is determined to characterize the evaporation behavior of n-heptane droplet stream under various boundary conditions. The equivalence ratios of droplet streams are varied by changing both the carrier-air flow rate and the fuel flow rate.

Similar laser welded blanks with same material and same gauge have been extensive applied in automobile body for improving the material utilization and extending maximum coil size. It is known that, for TWBs with dissimilar material and thicknesses, the difference of material properties and/or thickness of the welded blanks, change of the material properties in the weld seam and heat-affected zones (HAZ) as well as location and orientation of the weld seam are reasons for reduced formability. However, the plastic deformation capacity of TWBs is reduced even when the material and thickness are the same. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the deformation behaviors of similar laser welded joints. Uniaxial tensile of five laser welded joints, with 90°,60°,45°,30°and 0°weld orientations, were tested by using optical measurement-DIC (Digital Image Correlation). Strain /strain ratio distribution and evolution of each joint was analyzed and compared with base material.

The present work discusses a novel oxyfuel combustion method named internal combustion rankine cycle (ICRC) used in reciprocating engines. Water is heated up through heat exchanger by exhaust gas and engine cooling system, and then injected into the cylinder near top dead center to control the combustion temperature and in-cylinder pressure rise rate, meanwhile to enhance the thermo efficiency and work of the combustion cycle. That is because injected water increases the mass of the working fluid inside the cylinder, and can make use of the combustion heat more effectively. Waste heat carried away by engine coolant and exhaust gas can be recovered and utilized in this way. This study investigates the effect of water injection temperature on the combustion and emission characteristics of an ICRC engine based on self-designed test bench. The results indicate that both indicated work and thermal efficiency increase significantly due to water injection process.

Reducing the pumping loss, and thus, the fuel consumption of gasoline engine at part load, a two-stage intake valve lift system was implanted into a PFI engine. A corresponding engine model was set up with GT-power as well, which can simulate the effect of two-stage intake valve lift and different EGR rates on fuel economy performance and on combustion condition of a gasoline engine. Based on simulation results, the valve lift control strategy and EGR control strategy was studied in this paper. Results showed that at low engine speed, when SMALL LIFT was used, the tumble flow and the combustion process in cylinder was improved and burn time duration became shorter, resulting in higher indicated efficiency and lower fuel consumption than by LARGE LIFT. With the introduction of the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), lower fuel consumption was acquired.

Ion current sensing, which usually employs a spark plug as its sensor to obtain feedback signal from different types of combustion in SI engines, may be applied to HCCI combustion sensing instead of a prohibitively expensive piezoelectric pressure transducer. However, studies showed that the ion current detected by a spark plug sensor is a localized signal within the vicinity of the sensor's electrode gap, being affected by conditions around it. To find out better and feasible ion probe positions, a 3D-CFD model with a detailed surrogate mechanism containing 1423 species and 6106 reactions was employed to study the effect of stratification on ion distribution in HCCI combustion. The simulation results indicate that the monitor probe 1, 8 and 9 are more stable and reliable than the others. IONmax and dIONmax are more accurate to estimate CA50 and dQmax respectively.

Idle stopping is one of the most important fuel saving methods for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). While the enriched injection strategy which was employed to ensure reliable ignition of first cycle will leads to even more fuel film stayed in the intake port, all of the liquid film will evaporate randomly and interfere the mixture air-fuel ratio of the followed cycles. The fuel transport of the first cycle should be enhanced to reduce the residual fuel film, and then the control of the cycle-by-cycle air-fuel ratio will become easier and the combustion and HC emissions will also be better. In this paper the mixture preparation characteristics of the unfired first cycle, as well as the combustion and HC emissions characteristics of the fired first cycle under various injection timing strategies such as close-valve injection, mid-valve injection, and open-valve injection were investigated.

An ion current sensor is employed in a 4 cylinder production SI engine for combustion diagnosis during combustion process, knock, and low speed pre-ignition (LSPI) detection. The results show that the ion current peak value and ion current peak phase have strong correlation with the cylinder pressure and pressure peak phase respectively. The COV of ion current integral value is greater than the COV of IMEP at the same operating condition. Results show that the ion current signal is sensitive to different lambdas. Using ion current signal, the knock in any given cylinder can be detected. Importantly, the ion sensor successfully detected the low speed pre-ignition (LSPI) about more than 20 °CA before spark ignition.

Based on high EGR rate, the low temperature combustion (LTC) has been studied widely, of which the application range is more extensive than the homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) and premixed charge compression ignition (PCCI). As the high EGR rate would influence the condition of intake charge, it would also affect the combustion process and the HC emissions, thus the combustion stability of LTC would be lower than tradition diesel combustion. In this study, an ion current detecting technology was employed to explore the ion current at different EGR rates. Meanwhile, the combustion parameters were also investigated, which included the in-cylinder pressure and heat release rate. The CA50 and CAI50 were adopted as the phases of combustion and ion current, which respectively represented the crank angle of mid-point for the integrated heat release and integrated ion current. Then the correlation between CA50 and CAI50 was analysed.