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Wheel Aerodynamics is an important part of vehicle aerodynamics. The wheels can notably influence the total aerodynamic drag, lift and ventilation drag of vehicles. In order to simulate the real on-road condition of driving cars, the moving ground and wheel rotation is of major importance in CFD. However, the wheel rotation condition is difficult to be represented exactly, so this is still a critical topic which needs to be worked on. In this paper, a study, which focuses on two types of cars: a fastback sedan and a notchback DrivAer, is conducted. Comparing three different wheel rotating simulation methods: steady Moving wall, MRF and unsteady Sliding Mesh, the effects of different methods for the numerical simulation of vehicle aerodynamics are revealed. Discrepancies of aerodynamic forces between the methods are discussed as well as the flow field, and the simulation results are also compared with published experimental data for validation.

Distributed drive electric vehicle (EV) is driven by four independent hub motors mounted directly in wheels and retains traditional hydraulic brake system. So it can quickly produce driving/braking motor torque and large stable hydraulic braking force. In this paper a new control allocation strategy for distributed drive electric vehicle is proposed to improve vehicle's lateral stability performance. It exploits the quick response of motor torque and controllable hydraulic pressure of the hydraulic brake system. The allocation strategy consists of two sections. The first section uses an optimal allocation controller to calculate the total longitudinal force of each wheel. In the controller, a dynamic efficiency matrix is designed via local linearization to improve lateral stability control performance, as it considers the influence of tire coupling characteristics over yaw moment control in extreme situations.

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.

During light to moderate braking at high speed, the local high temperature phenomenon can be observed on the brake disc surfaces, known as hot spots. The occurrence of hot spots will lead to negative effects such as brake performance fade, thermal judder and local wear, which seriously affect the performance of vehicle NVH. In this paper, based on the bench test of a ventilated disc brake, the basic characteristics of hot spots is obtained and the evolution process of temperature field and disc deformation is analyzed in detail. In temperature field, hot bands appear first and grow, migrate from inner and outer radius to the middle, with the growing temperature fluctuation and finally hot spots appear in the middle radius of the brake disc. The stable SRO waviness forms much earlier than the temperature fluctuation. In the stop brake studied in this paper, the SRO waviness stabilizes in main 7 order state which is lower than the final hot spot order.

An accurate finite element (FE) model is the basis for the numerical prediction of vibration and noise of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs). This paper provides an equivalent modeling method of PMSMs considering the orthotropic material parameters of the stator system. First, a theoretical analysis of the influence of orthotropic material parameters on modal characteristics is implemented. Subsequently, the influence of orthotropic material parameters on the modal frequency of the stator is analyzed through the FE method. Then, the modal parameters of the stator core and the stator assembly are obtained by modal tests. According to the equivalent FE model and modal parameters, the orthotropic material parameters of the stator system are acquired. Moreover, to save the calculation time and simplify the modal identification process, the influence of windings is taken into account through additional mass and additional stiffness during the modeling process.

Tire cavity noise of pure electric vehicles is particularly prominent due to the absence of engine noise, which are usually eliminated by adding Helmholtz resonators with arbitrary transversal section to the wheel rims. This paper provides theoretical basis for accurately predicting and effectively improving acoustic performance of wheel resonators. A hybrid finite element method is developed to extract the transversal wavenumbers and eigenvectors, and the mode-matching scheme is employed to determine the transmission loss of the Helmholtz resonator. Based on the accuracy validation of this method, the matching design of the wheel resonators and the optimization method of tire cavity noise are studied. The identification method of the tire cavity resonance frequency is developed through the acoustic modal test. A scientific transmission loss target curve and fitness function are defined according to the noise characteristics.

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.

Tire forces and moments play an important role in vehicle dynamics and safety. X-by-wire chassis components including active suspension, electronic powered steering, by-wire braking, etc can take the tire forces as inputs to improve vehicle’s dynamic performance. In order to measure the accurate dynamic wheel load, most of the researches focused on the kinematic parameters such as body longitudinal and lateral acceleration, load transfer and etc. In this paper, the authors focus on the suspension system, avoiding the dependence on accurate mass and aerodynamics model of the whole vehicle. The geometry of the suspension is equated by the spatial parallel mechanism model (RSSR model), which improves the calculation speed while ensuring the accuracy. A suspension force observer is created, which contains parameters including spring damper compression length, push rod force, knuckle accelerations, etc., combing the kinematic and dynamic characteristic of the vehicle.

With the growing prosperity of the long-distance freight and urban logistics industry, the demand for cargo trucks is gradually increasing. The connecting bracket is the critical connecting part of the truck chassis, which bears the load transmitted by the road excitation and reduces the damage to the frame caused by the load. However, the occurrence of rough road conditions is inevitable in heavy-duty transportation. In this paper, road durability tests and fatigue life analysis are carried out on the original structure to ensure the safety of the vehicle. Based on the known boundary and load constraints, a lightweight and high-performance structure is obtained through size optimization, as the original structure cannot meet the performance requirements. Firstly, the road test was conducted on the truck where the original bracket structure is located.

Based on the emergency lane change cases extracted from the China naturalistic driving data, the driving steering behavior divides into three phases: collision avoidance, lateral movement and steering stabilization. Using the steering primitive fitting by Gaussian function, the distribution of the duration time, the relationship between steering wheel rate and deflection were analyzed in three phases. It is shown that the steering behavior essentially is composed of steering primitives during the emergency lane-change. However, the combination of the steering primitives is different according to the specific steering constraints in three phases. In the collision avoidance phase, a single steering primitive with high peak is used for the fast steering; in the lateral movement and stabilization phase, a combination of two or even more steering primitives is built to a more accurate steering.

The frame of a low-speed electric vehicle was treated as the research object in the paper. The fatigue load of the frame was analyzed with multi-body dynamics method and the fatigue life of frame was analyzed with the nominal stress method. Firstly, the multi-body dynamics model of the vehicle was established and the multi-body dynamics simulation was carried out to simulate the condition where the vehicle used to travel. The fatigue load history of the frame was obtained from the simulation. Secondly, the amplitude-frequency characteristic of the fatigue load was analyzed. The frequency of the fatigue load mainly focused on 0~20HZ from the analysis. Thirdly, the modal of frame was analyzed. As the frequency of the fatigue load was less than the natural frequency of the frame, the quasi-static method was selected to calculate the stress history of the frame. Next, the fatigue life of the frame was analyzed based on S-N curve.

The prevention and control of brake judder and its various negative effects has been a key target of vehicle production. One of the effects is the steering wheel vibration during vehicle braking. Experimental and theoretical investigation into “steering wheel vibration due to brake judder” is extensively presented in this paper. The vehicle road test is carried out under controlled braking conditions. During the test, the accelerations of brake caliper assembly, suspension low and upper control arm, steering arm, tie rod and steering wheel, left and right wheel rotary speed, are measured by a multi-channel data acquisition system. The data processing focuses on order tracking analysis and transfer path analysis to work out the related resonant components. A disc brake assembly, with deliberately designed disc thickness variation and surface run-out combinations, is tested on a brake dynamometer.

Recent toxicological and epidemiologic studies have shown that diesel emissions have been a significant toxic air contaminant. Catalyzed DPF (CDPF) not only significantly reduces the PM mass emissions (>90%), but also further promotes carrier self-regeneration and oxidize more harmful gaseous pollutants by the catalyst coated on the carrier. However, some ultrafine particles and potentially harmful gaseous pollutants, such as VOCs species, originally emitted in the vapor-phase at high plume temperature, may penetrate through the CDPF filter. Furthermore, the components and content of catalyst coated on the CDPF could influence the physicochemical properties and toxicity intensity of those escaping ultrafine particles and gaseous pollutants. In this work, (1) we investigated the influence of precious metal content as a variable parameter on the physicochemical properties and catalytic activities of the small CDPF samples.

In order to improve the robustness and stability of autonomous vehicle at high speed, a path tracking approach which combines front steering and differential braking is investigated in this paper. A bicycle model with 3-DOFs is established and a linear time-varying predictive model using front steering as its control input can be derived. Based on model predictive theory, the path tracking issue using linear time-varying model predictive control can be transformed into an online quadratic programming problem with constraints. The expected front steering angle can be obtained from online moving optimization. Then the direct yawing control is adopted to treat two types of differential braking control. The first one investigates steady-state gain of yaw rate in linear 2-DOFs vehicle model, and designs a stable differential braking controller which is based on reference yaw rate.

A composite steering control strategy, which combines four-wheel steering (4WS) and differential steering, is proposed in this paper, to optimize steering maneuverability in the conditions where the vehicle speed is below 15 Km/h, mainly for U-turning and parking conditions. A dynamic model is developed for the steering system and the tire system. Taking different steering wheel inputs into consideration, a 4WS control strategy proportional to the front wheel steering angle is quoted to improve the steering maneuverability in the low speed conditions and guarantee the manipulability by controlling the side slip of the vehicle. Based on the 4WS system, this paper explores the possibility of further improving the low-speed maneuverability of the vehicle through differential steering. And the differential steering control strategy is developed, including four hub-motor output modes. A composite steering controller is designed based on the 4WS-4WD electric vehicle platform.

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.

Thin-walled structures have been widely used in automobile body design because of its good lightweight and superior mechanical properties. For the energy-absorbing box of the automobile, it is necessary to consider its working conditions under the axial and oblique impact. In this paper, a novel hierarchical honeycomb is proposed and used as filler for thin-walled structures. Meanwhile, the crashworthiness performances of the conventional honeycomb-filled and the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structures under different impact conditions are systematically studied. The results indicate the energy absorption of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure is higher than that of the conventional honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure, and the impact angle has significant effects on the energy absorption performance of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled structure.

As is known to all, the structure of the chassis has been greatly simplified as the application of in-wheel motor in electric vehicle (EV) and distributed control is allowed. The micro EV can alleviate traffic jams, reduce the demand for motor and battery capacity due to its small size and light weight and accordingly solve the problem that in-wheel motor is limited by inner space of the wheel hub. As a result, this type of micro EV is easier to be recognized by the market. In the micro EV above, two seats are side by side and the battery is placed in the middle of the chassis. Besides, in-wheel motors are mounted on the rear axle and only front axle retains traditional hydraulic braking system. Based on this driving/braking system, distribution of braking torque, system reliability and braking intensity is analyzed in this paper.

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.

For an electric vehicle driven by four in-wheel motors, the torque of each wheel can be controlled precisely and independently. A closed-loop control method of differential drive assisted steering (DDAS) has been proposed to improve vehicle steering properties based on those advantages. With consideration of acceleration requirement, a three dimensional characteristic curve that indicates the relation between torque and angle of the steering wheel at different vehicle speeds was designed as a basis of the control system. In order to deal with the saturation of motor's output torque under certain conditions, an anti-windup PI control algorithm was designed. Simulations and vehicle tests, including pivot steering test, lemniscate test and central steering test were carried out to verify the performance of the DDAS in steering portability and road feeling.