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The conversion design strategy, and emissions and performance results for a dedicated propane, vapour injected, 1995 Dodge Dakota truck are reported. Data is obtained from the University of Waterloo entry in the 1997 Propane Vehicle Challenge. A key feature of the design strategy is its focus on testing and emissions while preserving low engine speed power for drivability. Major changes to the Dakota truck included the following: installation of a custom shaped fuel tank, inclusion of a fuel temperature control module, addition of a vaporizer and a fuel delivery metering unit, installation of a custom vapour distribution manifold, addition of an equivalence ratio electronic controller, inclusion of a wide range oxygen sensor, addition of an exhaust gas recirculation cooler and installation of thermal insulation on the exhaust system. A competition provided natural gas catalyst was used.

A 3-D numerical analysis model of transient heat transfer among the multi-component coupling system in combustion chamber of internal combustion engine has been developed successfully in the paper. The model includes almost all solid components in combustion chamber, such as piston assembly, cylinder liner, cylinder head gasket, cylinder head, intake valves and exhaust valves, etc. With two different coupling heat transfer modes, one is the lubricant film heat conduction between two moving components, another is the contact heat conduction between two immovable solid components, and with the direct coupled-field analysis method of FEM, the heat transfer relation among the components is established. The simulation result dedicates the transient heat transfer process among the components such as moving piston assembly and cylinder liner, moving valves and cylinder head. The effect of cylinder head gasket on heat transfer among the components is also studied.

In this paper, a new solution method is presented to study the effect of wave propagation in engine manifolds, which includes solving one-dimensional models for compressible flow of air. Velocity, pressure, and density profiles are found by solving a system of non-linear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) in space and time derived from Euler’s equations. The 1D model includes frictional losses, area change, and heat transfer. The solution is traditionally found by utilizing the Method of Characteristics and applying finite difference solutions to the resulting system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) over a discretized grid. In this work, orthogonal collocation is used to solve the system of ODEs that is defined along the characteristic curves. Orthogonal polynomials are utilized to approximate velocity, pressure, sound speed, and the characteristic curves along which the system of PDEs reduce to a system of ODEs.

This paper proposed a collision avoidance strategy that take over the control of ego vehicle when faced with urgent collision risk. To improve the applicability of collision avoidance strategy in complex scenarios, the theory of ICS (Inevitable Collision State) is introduced to evaluate the collision risk and compute the trigger flag of the system, and vehicle dynamic is taken into account when modeling ego vehicle to predict ego vehicle’s following moving. Vehicle specific characteristics including reaction time of the braking system and the braking force increasing process are taken into account. In order to reduce injury caused by collision accidents and minimize disruption to drivers, slight steering is added on top of emergency braking. The direction of the steering angle is determined according to IM (Imitating Maneuvers) The flow chart of the strategy is presented in the paper.

Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is an important measure to proactively guarantee vehicle safety. In this paper, the method of four-wheel hub-motor torque control is compared with the traditional single-wheel hydraulic brake control in ESC system. The control strategy adopts the hierarchical structure. In upper controller, the stability of the vehicle is identified by threshold method, the additional yaw moment control uses a way to get the moment including feedforward and feedback parts based on the linear quadratic regulator (LQR). The medium controller is tire slip rate control, in order to get the optimal target slip rate from the upper additional yaw moment, a method of quadratic programming to optimize the longitudinal force is proposed for each wheel. The inputs of tire state for the magic tire model is introduced so as to calculate the target slip rate from the target longitudinal force.

It is well-known that, compared with automatic transmissions (ATs), continuously variable transmission (CVT) shows advantages in fuel saving due to its continuous shift manner, since this feature enables the engine to operate in the efficiency-optimized region. However, as the AT gear number increases and the ratio gap narrows, this advantage of CVT is challenged. In this paper, a comparative study on fuel economy for a CVT based vehicle and a 9-speed automatic transmission (AT) based vehicle is proposed. The features of CVT and AT are analyzed and ratio control strategies for both the CVT and 9-speed AT based vehicles are designed from the view point of vehicle fuel economy, respectively. For the 9-speed AT, an optimal gear shift map is constructed. With this gear shift map, the optimal gear is selected as vehicle velocity and driving condition vary.

Due to the high cost of torque sensors, a calculation model of transient torque is required for real-time coordinating control purpose, especially in hybrid electric powertrains. This paper presents a feedforward calculation method based on mean value model of turbocharged non-EGR diesel engines. A fitting variable called fuel coefficient is defined in an affine relation between brake torque and fuel mass. The fitting of fuel coefficient is simplified to depend only on three variables (engine speed, boost pressure, injected fuel mass). And a two-layer feedforward neural network is utilized to fit the experimental data. The model is validated by load response test and ETC (European Transient Cycle) transient test. The RMSE (root mean square error) of the brake torque is less than 3%.

Research of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an important issue of intelligent vehicle (IV). As we all known, a real and experienced driver can control vehicle's speed very well under every traffic environment of ACC working. So a direct and feasible way for establishing ACC controller is to build a human-like longitudinal control algorithm with the simulation of driver behavior of speed control. In this paper, a novel fuzzy self-tuning control algorithm of ACC is established and this controller's parameters can be tuned on-line based on the evaluation indexes that can describe how the driver consider the quality of dynamical characteristic of vehicle longitudinal dynamics. With the advantage of the controller's parameter on-line self-tuning, the computational workload from matching design of ACC controller is also efficiently reduced.

Energy management strategies greatly influence the power performance and fuel economy of series hybrid electric tracked bulldozers. In this paper, we present a procedure for the design of a power management strategy by defining a cost function, in this case, the minimization of the vehicle’s fuel consumption over a driving cycle. To explore the fuel-saving potential of a series hybrid electric tracked bulldozer, a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is utilized to determine the optimal control actions for a series hybrid powertrain, and this can be the benchmark for the assessment of other control strategies. The results from comparing the DP strategy and the rule-based control strategy indicate that this procedure results in approximately a 7% improvement in fuel economy.

A HIL simulator for developing vehicle adaptive cruise control systems is presented in this paper. The xPC target is used to establish real-time simulation environment. The simulator is composed of a virtual vehicle model, real components of an ACC system like ECU, electronic throttle and braking modulator, a user interface to facilitate simulation, and brake and accelerator pedals to make interactive driver inputs easier. The vehicle model is validated against data from field test. Tests of an ACC controller in the real-time are conducted on the simulator.

Driving style and skill classification are of great significance in human-oriented advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) development. In this paper, we propose Fully-Connected Deep Neural Networks (FC-DNN) to classify drivers’ styles and skills with naturalistic driving data. Followed by the data collection and pre-processing, FC-DNN with a series of deep learning optimization algorithms are applied. In the experimental part, the proposed model is validated and compared with other commonly used supervised learning methods including the k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). The results show that the proposed model has a higher Macro F1 score than other methods. In addition, we discussed the effect of different time window sizes on experimental results. The results show that the driving information of 1s can improve the final evaluation score of the model.

The accuracy of tire forces directly affects the vehicle dynamics model precision and determines the ability of the model to develop the simulation platform or design the control strategy. In the high slip angle, due to the complex interactions at tire-road interfaces, the forces generated by the tires are high nonlinearity and uncertainty, which pose issues in calculating tire force accurately. This paper presents a hybrid physical and data-driven tire force calculation framework, which can satisfy the high nonlinearity and uncertainty condition, improve the model accuracy and effectively leverage prior knowledge of physical laws. The parameter identification for the physical tire model and the data-based compensation for the unknown errors between the physical tire model and actual tire force data are contained in this framework. First, the parameters in the selected combined-slip Burckhardt tire model are identified by the nonlinear least square method with tire test data.

Taking full advantage of available traffic environment information, making control decisions, and then planning trajectory systematically under structured roads conditions is a critical part of intelligent vehicle. In this article, a lane-changing decision-making method for intelligent vehicle is proposed based on acceleration field. Firstly, an acceleration field related to relative velocity and relative distance was built based on the analysis of braking process, and acceleration was taken as an indicator of safety evaluation. Then, a lane-changing decision method was set up with acceleration field while considering driver’s habits, traffic efficiency and safety. Furthermore, velocity regulation was also introduced in the lane-changing decision method to make it more flexible.

In this paper, a high-efficiency and low-cost lithium-ion battery pack active balance system is designed. It adopts a distributed structure and consists of three parts: auxiliary power module, one-way isolated DC/DC conversion module, and a battery group. The battery single cells in the battery pack are layered and divided into m battery groups in total, and each battery group is composed of n battery single cells. Each battery group is connected to an isolated DC/DC conversion module, and all the conversion modules are connected in parallel with the auxiliary power. Taking the SOC average value of the all-single cells in one battery group as the balancing variable, the auxiliary power is controlled to charge the battery group with the lower SOC average value, so that the difference of the SOC average value of all battery groups is within the set threshold range, so as to realize the active balance of each battery group.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are being developed for more and more complicated application scenarios, which often require more predictive strategies with better understanding of driving environment. Taking traffic vehicles’ maneuvers into account can greatly expand the beforehand time span for danger awareness. This paper presents a maneuver-based strategy to vehicle collision threat assessment. First, a maneuver-based trajectory prediction model (MTPM) is built, in which near-future trajectories of ego vehicle and traffic vehicles are estimated with the combination of vehicle’s maneuvers and kinematic models that correspond to every maneuver. The most probable maneuvers of ego vehicle and each traffic vehicles are modeled and inferred via Hidden Markov Models with mixture of Gaussians outputs (GMHMM). Based on the inferred maneuvers, trajectory sets consisting of vehicles’ position and motion states are predicted by kinematic models.

An autonomous vehicle is a comprehensive intelligent system that includes environment sensing, vehicle localization, path planning and decision-making control, of which environment sensing technology is a prerequisite for realizing autonomous driving. In the early days, vehicles sensed the surrounding environment through sensors such as cameras, radar, and lidar. With the development of 5G technology and the Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), other information from the roadside can also be received by vehicles. Such as traffic jam ahead, construction road occupation, school area, current traffic density, crowd density, etc. Such information can help the autonomous driving system understand the current driving environment more clearly. Vehicles are no longer limited to areas that can be sensed by sensors. Vehicles with different autonomous driving levels have different adaptability to the environment.

Lithium-ion battery plays a key role in electric vehicles, which is critical to the system availability. One of the most important aspects in battery managements systems(BMS) in electric vehicles is the stage of health(SOH) estimation. The state of health (SOH) estimation is very critical to battery management system to ensure the safety and reliability of EV battery operation. The classical approach of current integration(coulomb counting) can't get the accurate values because of accumulative error. In order to provide timely maintenance and replacements of electric vehicles, several estimation approaches have been proposed to develop a reliable and accurate battery state of health estimation. A common drawback of previous algorithm is that the computation quantity is huge and not quite accurate, that is updated partially in this study.

Overloading of trucks can easily cause damage to roads, bridges and other transportation facilities, and accelerate the fatigue loss of the vehicles themselves, and accidents are prone to occur under overload conditions. In recent years, various countries have formulated a series of management methods and governance measures for truck overloading. However, the detection method for overload behavior is not efficient and accurate enough. At present, the method of dynamic load identification is not perfect. No matter whether it is the dynamic weight measurement method of reconstructing the road surface or the non-contact dynamic weight measurement method, little attention is paid to the difference of different vehicles. Especially for different vehicles, there should be different load limits, and the current devices are not smart enough.

A control algorithm is developed for active/semi-active suspensions which can provide more comfort and better handling simultaneously. A weighting parameter is tuned online which is derived from two components - slow and fast adaptation to assign weights to comfort and handling. After establishing through simulations that the proposed adaptive control algorithm can demonstrate a performance better than some controllers in prior-art, it is implemented on an actual vehicle (Cadillac STS) which is equipped with MR dampers and several sensors. The vehicle is tested on smooth and rough roads and over speed bumps.

In this work, a new air hybrid engine is introduced in which two throttles are used to manage the engine load in three modes of operation i.e. braking, air motor, and conventional mode. The concept includes an air tank to store pressurized air during braking and rather than a fully variable valve timing (VVT) system, two throttles are utilized. Use of throttles can significantly reduce the complexity of air hybrid engines. The valves need three fixed timing schedules for the three modes of operation. To study this concept, for each mode, the results of engine simulations using GT-Power software are used to generate the operating maps. These maps show the maximum braking torque as well as maximum air motor torque in terms of air tank pressure and engine speed. Moreover, the resulting maps indicate the operating conditions under which each mode is more effective. Based on these maps, a power management strategy is developed to achieve improved fuel economy.