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Modern air vehicles face increasing internal heat loads that must be appropriately understood in design and managed in operation. This paper examines one solution to creating more efficient and effective thermal management systems (TMSs): vapor cycle systems (VCSs). VCSs are increasingly being investigated by aerospace government and industry as a means to provide much greater efficiency in moving thermal energy from one physical location to another. In this work, we develop the AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) Transient Thermal Modeling and Optimization (ATTMO) toolbox: a modeling and simulation tool based in Matlab/Simulink that is suitable for understanding, predicting, and designing a VCS. The ATTMO toolbox also provides capability for understanding the VCS as part of a larger air vehicle system. The toolbox is presented in a modular fashion whereby the individual components are presented along with the framework for interconnecting them.

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.

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.

Compared to conventional injection techniques, Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) has a lot of advantages such as increased fuel efficiency, high power output and low emission levels, which can be more accurately controlled. Therefore, this technique is an important topic of today's injection system research. Although the operating conditions of GDI injectors are simpler from a numerical point of view because of smaller Reynolds and Weber numbers compared to Diesel injection systems, accurate simulations of the breakup in the vicinity of the nozzle are very challenging. Combined with the complications of experimental techniques that could be applied inside the nozzle and at the nozzle exit, this is the reason for the lack of understanding the primary breakup behavior of current GDI injectors.

The vehicle overload seriously jeopardizes traffic safety and affects traffic efficiency. At present, the static weighing station and weigh-in-motion station are both relatively fixed, so the detection efficiency is not high and the traffic efficiency is affected; the on-board dynamic weighing equipment is difficult to be popularized because of the problem of being deliberately damaged or not accepted by the purchaser. This paper proposes an efficient, accurate, non-contact vehicle overload identification method which can keep the road unimpeded. The method can detect the vehicle overload by the relative distance (as the characteristic distance) between the dynamic vehicle's marking line and the road surface. First, the dynamics model of the vehicle suspension is set up. Then, the dynamic characteristic distance of the traffic vehicle is detected from the image acquired by the calibrated camera based on computer vision and image recognition technology.

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.

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.

Intelligent sweeper vehicle is gradually applied to human life, in which the accuracy of garbage identification and classification can improve cleaning efficiency and save labor cost. Although Deep Learning has made significant progress in computer vision and the application of semantic network segmentation can improve waste identification rate and classification accuracy. Due to the loss of some spatial information during the convolution process, coupled with the lack of specific datasets for garbage identification, the training of the network and the improvement of recognition and classification accuracy are affected. Based on the Unet algorithm, in this paper we adjust the number of input and output channels in the convolutional layer to improve the speed during the feature extraction part. In addition, manually generated datasets are used to greatly improve the robustness of the model.

With the development of advanced ABE fermentation technology, the volumetric percentage of acetone, butanol and ethanol in the bio-solvents can be precisely controlled. To seek for an optimized volumetric ratio for ABE-diesel blends, the previous work in our team has experimentally investigated and analyzed the combustion features of ABE-diesel blends with different volumetric ratio (A: B: E: 6:3:1; 3:6:1; 0:10:0, vol. %) in a constant volume chamber. It was found that an increased amount of acetone would lead to a significant advancement of combustion phasing whereas butanol would compensate the advancing effect. Both spray dynamic and chemistry reaction dynamic are of great importance in explaining the unique combustion characteristic of ABE-diesel blend. In this study, a semi-detailed chemical mechanism is constructed and used to model ABE-diesel spray combustion in a constant volume chamber.

An accurate and timely positioning of the vehicle is required at all times for autonomous driving. The global navigation satellite system (GNSS), even when integrated with costly inertial measurement units (IMUs), would often fail to provide high-accuracy positioning due to GNSS-challenged environments such as urban canyons. As a result, visual odometry is proposed as an effective complimentary approach. Although it’s widely recognized that visual odometry should be developed based on both visible and infrared images to address issues such as frequent changes in ambient lightening conditions, the mechanism of visible-infrared fusion is often poorly designed. This study proposes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based model comprises a generator, which aims to produce a fused image combining infrared intensities and visible gradients, and a discriminator whose target is to force the fused image to retain as many details that exist mostly in visible images as possible.

Vehicles equipped with articulated steering systems have advantages such as low energy consumption, simple structure, and excellent maneuverability. However, due to the specific characteristics of the system, these vehicles often face challenges in terms of lateral stability. Addressing this issue, this paper leverages the precise and independently controllable wheel torques of a hub motor-driven vehicle. First, an equivalent double-slider model is selected as the dynamic control model, and the control object is rationalized. Subsequently, based on the model predictive control method and considering control accuracy and robustness, a weight-variable adaptive model predictive control approach is proposed. This method addresses the optimization challenges of multiple systems, constraints, and objectives, achieving adaptive control of stability, maneuverability, tire slip ratio, and articulation angle along with individual wheel torques during the entire steering process of the vehicle.

Artificial ice shapes of various geometric fidelity were tested on a wing model based on the Common Research Model. Low Reynolds number tests were conducted at Wichita State University’s Walter H. Beech Memorial Wind Tunnel utilizing an 8.9% scale model, and high Reynolds number tests were conducted at ONERA’s F1 wind tunnel utilizing a 13.3% scale model. Several identical geometrically-scaled ice shapes were tested at both facilities, and the results were compared at overlapping Reynolds and Mach numbers. This was to ensure that the results and trends observed at low Reynolds number could be applied and continued to high, near-flight Reynolds number. The data from Wichita State University and ONERA F1 agreed well at matched Reynolds and Mach numbers. The lift and pitching moment curves agreed very well for most configurations.

Local nonlinearities can affect the global dynamics of their linear host structures. In the context of fixed-wing aircraft, failure of store mounting can result in strong local nonlinearities. In this work, we experimentally mimic store mounting failure conditions in a model airplane subject to harmonic excitation. Two identical stores are mounted under the wings and are placed symmetrically opposite each other. The configuration where both stores are “locked”, i.e., mounting is very stiff, serves as the baseline linear system. The second configuration involves unlocking one of the stores, enabling a geometrically nonlinear flexure connection between the unlocked store and the wing. The flexure lets the store interact with the first flexible mode of the airplane, resulting in large relative displacements between the store and wing. In addition, the configuration allows for vibro-impacts between the wing and store.

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).

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.

This work analyzes the transmission efficiency of vehicle driveline including the gearbox, universal transmission and differential. Based on the structure of transmission, mathematic models are built to analyze transmission's characteristics. However, an experiment reveals the limitation of this method. Then, the paper statistically analyzes the experimental data and mainly analyzes the influencing factors. Then Neural Network is used to build the efficiency model. A method called “filling data and gradually extrapolating” is used when building neural network model. Finally, the neural network model is used in the simulation of fuel consumption. The conclusion is Neural Network model can imitate the transmission efficiency of vehicle driveline efficiently, but its internal structure is not clear so other modeling methods are needed to be found.

The modeling of fuel jet atomization is key in the characterization of Internal Combustion (IC) engines, and 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a recognized tool to provide insights for design and control purposes. Multi-hole injectors with counter-bored nozzle are the standard for Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) applications and the Spray-G injector from the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) is considered the reference for numerical studies, thanks to the availability of extensive experimental data. In this work, the behavior of the Spray-G injector is simulated in a constant volume chamber, ranging from sub-cooled (nominal G) to flashing conditions (G2), validating the models on Diffused Back Illumination and Phase Doppler Anemometry data collected in vaporizing inert conditions.

The potential for automotive exhaust-based thermoelectric generator (TEG) has been increasing with continuously advances in thermoelectric technology. In this paper, the thermal deformation of the TEG system is studied on the basis of the surface temperature distribution of the heat exchanger. The simulation result shows that thermoelectric modules (TMs) on different positions have different thermal performance which can significantly influence the power generation efficiency of the system. Meanwhile, in terms of the working performance of TMs, the clamping mechanism is considered to have some effects on both the cold side and the hot side of TEG. Following the simulation, bench tests are carried out to confirm the reasonability of the simulation results.