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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.

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.

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.

The high gravity center of the concrete mixer truck reduces the truck’s stability while steering. The rolling stirring tank makes the stability even worse than the regular engineering vehicle due to the dynamic variation of the centroid position. Most of the researches on the rollover stability of concrete mixer trucks focus on the rollover model establishment and dynamic simulation module. The change of concrete centroid is ignored when the safety cornering speed is calculated. This paper proposes a pre-warning method for the cornering speed of concrete mixer trucks based on centroid dynamic simulation. In the method, the mixing tank stirring model and the vehicle driving dynamic model are established on the Fluent and TruckSim simulation platforms, respectively. The theoretical speed threshold obtained by simulation is used as the evaluation index of the warning speed in the curve. Firstly, the dynamic simulation of the stirring tank model is carried out by Fluent.

The acquisition of vehicle dimensions in a vehicle’s moving process has a wide application in road monitoring, transportation, vehicle model recognition and non-contact overload recognition. At present, the detection of the vehicle dimensions mostly adopts the methods of human visual inspection and tool detection, which has a low detection efficiency and difficult to replicate on a large scale. Based on the image background subtraction method, this paper proposes a vehicle dimensions detection method, which can realize real-time detection of road vehicle dimensions. This method uses an adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to establish a background model based on the video stream. Initially, the moving target image is obtained by the background subtraction method, and then the edge detection under the Canny operator and Hough transform circle detection are performed on the image to obtain the pixel dimension of the vehicle's outline.

In ITS, image processing technology is applied to a wide variety of areas such as visual-based intelligent vehicle navigation, visual-based traffic monitoring and visual-based traffic management. In the recognition system of the vehicle body characteristics, most of the recognition is the license plate and the car emblem, etc. This paper proposes an image recognition application method for the vertical motion of the car while driving, mainly including vertical height detection and vertical displacement velocity acceleration recognition. The edge detection model of the image object is established by using the gray image to obtain the car motion segmentation image. At the same time, an image length and actual length coordinate conversion model is established, which can calculate an arbitrary actual length of the image object. In this paper, Yuejin Shangjun X500 van was selected as the test vehicle, and the video data was captured with a camera.

A flow divider valve is a device which allows a single stream of fluid to be split into two paths according to a predetermined ratio and independent of variations or differences in the load pressures. A flow combiner valve combines two paths of fluid into one stream such that the ratio of the flow rates coming into the valve remains independent of any variation or difference between the inlet pressures. This paper describes the design, operation and performance of an integrated flow divider/combiner valve. This design maintains the small flow dividing/combining error of high precision valves (less than 1.5% at rated flow) but incorporates the shuttle valve into the main spool system. This new design reduces the weight of the valve by 20% reducing the cost by approximately 10%. The new structure simplifies the construction of high precision valves and reduces a source of flow dividing/combining error (leakage).

The development of high precision flow divider/combiner valves has received considerable attention by the authors over the past decade. Several different valve designs for division and combination of flow have been designed which display small flow dividing/combining error (1-2%) when compared to conventional designs (2-10%). Recent studies have improved upon the design in order to reduce cost, weight and complexity of the valve. This paper will present the latest of the authors research into the development of a high precision, autoregulated flow divider/combiner valve with an integral shuttle valve. The autoregulator extends the operating range of the integrated flow divider/combiner valve (for errors less than 2 %) to 10-50 lpm compared to 30-50 lpm for the unregulated valve.

On-road testing of driving performance of the urban bus was carried out, and a representative urban bus driving cycle was developed after on-road testing, according to the test results. Then, the vehicle simulation software AVL CRUISE was used to simulate the dynamic behavior of the urban bus. It involves the simulation of complete drive train system and the driver behavior. The model is validated by comparing the results of the simulation to the results of the field test. Then the developed driving cycle is evaluated by fuel consumption resulted from the simulation and engine bench test on fuel economy.

Road traffic accidents resulting from alcohol-impaired driving are increasing globally despite several measures, currently in place, to curb the trend. For this reason, recent research aims at integrating alcohol early-detection systems and driving simulator experiments to identify intoxicated drivers. However, driving simulator experiments on drunk driving have focused mostly on male participants than female drivers whose characteristics have scarcely been explored. Hence in this paper, vehicle dynamic control inputs on steering, braking, and acceleration performance of 75 licensed female drivers with an upshot of alcohol at four different blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels (0%, 0.03%, 0.05%, and 0.08%) were investigated. The participants completed simulated driving in a fixed-based simulator experiment coupled with real-time ecological scenarios to extract discrete responses.

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.

Preventing skidding is essential for studying the safety of driving in curves. However, the adhesion of the vehicle during the driving process on the wet and slippery road will be significantly reduced, resulting in lateral slippage due to the low adhesion coefficient of the road surface, the speed exceeding the turning critical, and the turning radius being too small when passing through the corner. Therefore, to reduce the incidence of traffic accidents of passenger cars driving in curves on rainy and snowy days and achieve the purpose of planning safe driving speed, this paper proposes a curve active safety system based on a deep learning algorithm and vehicle dynamics model. First,we a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is constructed to extract and judge the characteristics of snow and ice adhesion on roads.

The basic principle of wavelet transform is presented and the method of wavelet theory is used in vibration signal analysis of vehicle in this paper. The vibration signals which generated in the locations such as cab floor, engine, transmission, band spring and frame under the usual work condition are measured by the vibration test system. The vibration signals are decomposed with the principle of wavelet decomposition at level six, and eigenvectors of signal energy are gained. According to the correlation coefficient of eigenvectors of signal energy distribution, two signals correlativity is determined. It could be an effective method that identificate the main vibration source.

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) is one of the Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms. Because of the well perform in continuous motion control, DDPG algorithm is applied in the field of self-driving. Regarding the problems of the instability of DDPG algorithm during training and low training efficiency and slow convergence rate. An improved DDPG algorithm based on segmented experience replay is presented. On the basis of the DDPG algorithm, the segmented experience replay select the training experience by the importance according to the training progress to improve the training efficiency and stability of the training model. The algorithm was tested in an open source 3D car racing simulator called TORCS. The simulation results demonstrate the training stability is significantly improved compared with the DDPG algorithm and the DQN algorithm, and the average return is about 46% higher than the DDPG algorithm and about 55% higher than the DQN algorithm.

In these years, the advantages of using phase change material (PCM) in the thermal management of electric power battery has been wide spread. Because of the thermal conductivity of most phase change material (eg.wax) is low, many researchers choose to add high conductivity materials (such as black lead). However, the solid-liquid change material has large mass, poor flow-ability and corrosively. Therefore, it still stays on experiential stage. In this paper, the Thermal characteristics of power battery firstly be invested and the requirements of thermal management system also be discussed. Then a new PCM thermal management has been designed which uses pure water as liquid phase change material, adopts PCM with a reflux device for thermal management.

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.

The automatic emergency braking (AEB) system is an important part of automobile active safety, which can effectively reduce rear-end collision accidents and protect drivers' safety through active braking. AEB system has been included in many countries' new car assessment programme as the test content of active safety. In view of obviously deficiencies of the existing AEB control algorithm in avoiding longitudinal collision at high speed, it is proposed to an optimized model of the minimum safe distance for rear-end collision prevention on high-speed road in order to improve the accuracy of AEB system. Considering the influence of road adhesion coefficient and human comfort on the maximum braking deceleration, it is established to a more accurate and reasonable AEB system to avoid collision for expressway. The collision avoidance strategy is verified by simulation software.

Typical vehicle speed deceleration occurs at the freeway exit due to the driving direction change. Well conducting the driver to control the velocity could enhance the vehicle maneuverability and give drivers more response time when running into potential dangerous conditions. The freeway exit speed limit sign (ESLS) is an effect way to remind the driver to slow down the vehicle. The ESLS visibility is significant to guarantee the driving safety. This research focuses on the color variable ESLS system, which is placed at the same location with the traditional speed limit sign. With this system, the driver could receive the updated speed limit recommendation in advance and without distraction produced by eyes contract change over the dashboard and the front sight. First, the mathematical model of the drivetrain and the engine brake is built for typical motor vehicles. The vehicle braking characteristics with various initial speeds in the deceleration area are studied.

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.

Discretionary lane changing is commonly seen in highway driving. Intelligent vehicles are expected to change lanes discretionarily for better driving experience and higher traffic efficiency. This study proposed to optimize the decision-making and trajectory-planning process so that intelligent vehicles made lane changes not only with driving safety taken into account, but also with the goal to improve driving comfort as well as to meet the driver’ s expectation. The mechanism of how various factors contribute to the driver’s intention to change lanes was studied by carrying out a series of driving simulation experiments, and a Lane-Changing Intention Generation (LCIG) model based on Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) was proposed.