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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.

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.

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.

The motivation of the present work was to understand the mechanism by which alcohols produce less aromatic species in their combustion process than an equal amount of hydrocarbon with similar molecular structure does. Due to its numerous advantages over short-chain alcohols, butanol has been considered very promising in soot reduction. Excluding the influence of spray, vaporization and mixing process in engine cases, an adiabatic constant-pressure reactor model was applied to investigate the effect of butanol additives on aromatic species, which are known to be soot precursors, in fuel-rich butane flames. To keep the carbon flux constant, 5% and 10% oxygen by mass of the fuel were added to butane using butanol additive, respectively. Based on the soot reduction effects proposed in literature, effects on temperature, key radical concentrations and the carbon removal from the pathway to aromatic species were considered to identify the major mechanism of reduction in aromatic species.

In automatic driving application, the velocity planner can be considered as a key factor to ensure the safety and comfort. One of the most important tasks of the velocity planner is to simulate the velocity characteristics of human drivers. In this paper, two Driver In-the-Loop (DIL) experiments are designed to explain velocity characteristics of human drivers. In the first experiment, static obstacles are placed on both sides of the straight road to shorten the cross range that vehicles can driver across. Moreover, different cross ranges are set to study the influence of the steering wheel error. In the second experiment, velocity characteristics are investigated under the condition of different road widths and curvatures in a U-turn road contour. In both tests, different drivers’ preview behavior is analyzed through the operation of throttle, braking, and steering.

Butanol, which is a renewable biofuel, has been regarded as a promising alternative fuel for internal combustion engines. When blended with diesel and applied to pilot ignited natural gas engines, butanol has the capability to achieve lower emissions without sacrifice on thermal efficiency. However, high blend ratio of butanol is limited by its longer ignition delay caused by the higher latent heat and higher octane number, which restricts the improvement of emission characteristics. In this paper, the potential of increasing butanol blend ratio by adding hot exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is investigated. 3D CFD model based on a detailed kinetic mechanism was built and validated by experimental results of natural gas engine ignited by diesel/butanol blends. The effects of hot EGR is then revealed by the simulation results of the combustion process, heat release traces and also the emissions under different diesel/butanol blend ratios.

In the present study, we developed a reduced chemical reaction mechanism consisted of n-heptane and toluene as surrogate fuel species for diesel engine combustion simulation. The LLNL detailed chemical kinetic mechanism for n-heptane was chosen as the base mechanism. A multi-technique reduction methodology was applied, which included directed relation graph with error propagation and sensitivity analysis (DRGEPSA), non-essential reaction elimination, reaction pathway analysis, sensitivity analysis, and reaction rate adjustment. In a similar fashion, a reduced toluene mechanism was also developed. The reduced n-heptane and toluene mechanisms were then combined to form a diesel surrogate mechanism, which consisted of 158 species and 468 reactions. Extensive validations were conducted for the present mechanism with experimental ignition delay in shock tubes and laminar flame speeds under various pressures, temperatures and equivalence ratios related to engine conditions.

Turbochargers can improve vehicle dynamic performance and fuel economy and are applied widely nowadays. Due to the existence of turbocharger delay effect, acceleration delay and insufficient combustion are its disadvantages. By collecting high pressure gas which generates from the inertia of the turbine in the intake passage when the vehicle slows down, the gas can be supplied for the shortage while the vehicle is accelerating, which can reduce turbocharger delay effect directly. However, turbocharger delay effect changes a little at high speed and low speed which is subjected to the air inflation and short air-release time. This paper adds a set of pressure booster device on the existing inflating-deflating device, whose thermal energy comes from the compressed air and lubricating oil, to facilitate pressure increasing in inflating-deflating device and help the chamber change sooner, which avails to relieve the delay effect.

This paper presents a method of calculating temperature field of the piston by using a wavelet neural network (WNN) to identify the unknown boundary conditions. Because of the complexity of the heat transfer and limitations of experimental conditions of heat transfer analysis of the piston in a diesel engine, boundary conditions of the piston temperature field were usually obtained empirically, and thus the result itself was uncertain. By employing the capability of resolution analysis from a wavelet neural network, the method obtains improved boundary heat transfer coefficients with a limited number of measured temperatures. Using FEA software iteratively, results show the proposed wavelet neural network analysis method improves the prediction of unknown boundary conditions and temperature distribution consistent with the experimental data with an acceptable error.

The articulated steering system is widely used in engineering vehicles due to its high mobility and low steering radius. The design parameters have a vital impact on the selection of the steering system assemblies, such as the operation stroke, pressure, and force of the hydraulic cylinders during the steering process, which will affect the system weight. The system energy consumption is also relevant to the geometry parameters. According to the kinetic analysis of the steering system and dynamic analysis of the steering process, the kinetic model of an engineering vehicle steering system is built, and the length and pressure variation of the cylinder is calculated and validated by the field test. The influence of the factors is analyzed based on the established model. To lower the system weight, needed pressure, and force, the multi-objective particle swarm optimization method is initiated to optimize the geometry parameter of the articulated steering system.

As motor assembly of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) replaces engine system of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle, interior structure-borne noise induced by road random excitation becomes more prominent under middle and high speed. The research is focused on central driving type BEV. In order to improve interior noise in middle and low frequency range, dynamic load of BEV body must be identified. Consequently the structural noise induced by road excitation is conducted. The limitations of common identification method for dynamic body load are analyzed. The applied several identification methods are proposed for deterministic dynamic load such as engine or motor. Random dynamic load generated by road excitation is different from deterministic dynamic load. The deterministic load identification method cannot be applied to the random load directly. An identification method of dynamic body load for BEV is presented based on power spectrum decomposition.

The hydraulic retarder is the most stabilized auxiliary braking system [1-2] of heavy-duty vehicles. When the hydraulic retarder is working during auxiliary braking, all of the braking energy is transferred into the thermal energy of the transmission medium of the working wheel. Theoretically, the residual heat-sinking capability of the engine could be used to cool down the transmission medium of the hydraulic retarder, in order to ensure the proper functioning of the hydraulic retarder. Never the less, the hydraulic retarder is always placed at the tailing head of the gearbox, far from the engine, long cooling circuits, which increases the risky leakage risk of the transmission medium. What's more, the development trend of heavy load and high speed vehicle directs the significant increase in the thermal load of the hydraulic retarder, which even higher than the engine power.

Recent research has shown that butanol, instead of ethanol, has the potential of introducing a more suitable blend in diesel engines. This is because butanol has properties similar to current transportation fuels in comparison to ethanol. However, the main downside is the high cost of the butanol production process. Acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) is an intermediate product of the fermentation process of butanol production. By eliminating the separation and purification processes, using ABE directly in diesel blends has the potential of greatly decreasing the overall cost for fuel production. This could lead to a vast commercial use of ABE-diesel blends on the market. Much research has been done in the past five years concerning spray and combustion processes of both neat ABE and ABE-diesel mixtures. Additionally, different compositions of ABE mixtures had been characterized with a similar experimental approach.

To make full use of engine exhaust heat and further improve the utilization of the energy efficiency of the heavy truck, thermoelectric module is used to contribute to thermoelectric power generation. The hot-end temperature of the module varies with the engine operating condition because it is connected with the exhaust pipe. The cold-end of the thermoelectric module is mainly cooled by engine cooling system. Increasing the temperature difference between the hot-end and cold-end of the thermoelectric module is a good way to improve the thermoelectric conversion efficiency. For the poor controllability of the hot-end temperature of the thermoelectric module, this study puts forward by lowering the cold-end temperature of the thermoelectric module so as to ensure the improvement of the thermoelectric conversion efficiency. The cooling circle for the cold-end of the thermoelectric module which is independent of the engine cooling system is built.

For fracture cracks that occurred in the tight coupling exhaust manifold durability test of a four-cylinder gasoline engine with EGR channel, causes and solutions for fracture failure were found with the help of CFD and FEA numerical simulations. Wall temperature and heat transfer coefficient of the exhaust manifold inside wall were first accurately obtained through the thermal-fluid coupling analysis, then thermal modal and thermoplastic analysis were acquired by using the finite element method, on account of the bolt pretightening force and the contact relationship between flange face and cylinder head. Results showed that the first-order natural frequency did not meet the design requirements, which was the main reason of fatigue fracture. However, when the first-order natural frequency was rising, the delta equivalent plastic strain was increasing quickly as well.

This paper presents a Driver-In-the-Loop (DIL) bench test system for development of ESC controller. The real-time platform is built-up based on NI/PXI system and the real steering/throttle/braking actuator. In addition, the CarSim provides the vehicle model and the animator for virtual driving environment. A hierarchical ESC controller is proposed in MATLAB/Simulink then download into PXI. In the upper motion controller, the sliding mode theory is adopted and the logic threshold algorithm is used in the lower slip controller. Finally, ESC test is implemented under typical conditions by DIL and Model-In-the-Loop (MIL). The results show that, DIL could make up the shortage of driver model which can’t accurately simulate the emergency response of real driver. Therefore, DIL test could verify the ESC controller more accurately and effectively with considering the human-vehicle-road environment.

The multi-functional mechanical arm equipped on engineering vehicle can achieve different functions by installing different mechanism devices through the interface at the end of the mechanical arm. It can achieve functions like engineering construction and road rescue. Mechanical arm systems often work in complex environments, which requires good reliability and safety of the boom system. When the mechanical boom is working, the pressure of each luffing cylinder is large, and the contact force and acceleration of each boom are complex, which requires a certain degree of verification and optimization before it can be put into production. In this paper, a virtual prototype of a vehicle mounted hydraulic mechanical arm with four booms is established. Through ADAMS, the dynamic analysis of mechanical arm under multiple working conditions is carried out, the movement parameter changes and the pressure changes of each luffing cylinder are analyzed.

Vehicle hydraulic retarders are applied in heavy-duty trucks and buses as an auxiliary braking device. In traditional cooling systems of hydraulic retarders, the working fluid is introduced into the heat exchanger to transfer heat to the cooling liquid in circulation, whose heat is then dissipated by the engine cooling system. This prevents the waste heat of the working fluid from being used effectively. In hydraulic retarder cooling system based on the Organic Rankine Cycle, the organic working fluid first transfers heat with the hydraulic retarder working fluid in Rankine cycle, and then outputs power through expansion machine. It can both reduce heat load of the engine cooling system, and enhance thermal stability of the hydraulic retarder while recovering and utilizing braking energy. First of all, according to the target vehicle model, hydraulic retarder cooling system model based on Rankine cycle is established.

In order to acquire low fuel consumption while the engine is running at low speeds and maintain the high power output of the traditional 4-valve engine at high speeds, multiple camshafts were applied in gasoline engines. An engine cycle simulation process of a gasoline engine with multiple camshaft profiles was presented in this paper. Engine cycle models were set up to describe external characteristic at 14 different speeds. A one-dimension model was used to describe the transient heat and mass transfer in pipes of the gasoline engine. In-cylinder combustion model was calibrated by engine test results. The simulation results showed a good agreement with engine testing results. Simulation and experimental research showed the volumetric efficiency and torque were low from 2500rpm to 3500rpm. Some parametrical study was presented for performance improvement of intermediate speeds, including changing induction-pipe length and putting off multiple camshafts shift.