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Particle Number (PN) have already been a big issue for developing high efficiency internal combustion engines (ICEs). In this study, controlled spark-assisted stratified compression ignition (SSCI) with moderate end-gas auto-ignition was used for reducing PN in a high compression ratio gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine. Under wide open throttle (WOT) and Maximum Brake Torque timing (MBT) condition, high external cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) was filled in the cylinder, while two-stage direct injection was used to form desired stoichiometric but stratified mixture. SSCI combustion mode exhibits two-stage heat release, where the first stage is associated with flame propagation induced by spark ignition and the second stage is the result of moderate end-gas auto-ignition without pressure oscillation at the middle or late stage of the combustion process.

Using EGR instead of throttle to control the load of a stoichiometric dual-fuel dieseline (diesel and gasoline) compression ignition (SDCI) engine with three-way catalyst (TWC) aftertreatment is considered a promising technology to address the challenges of fuel consumption and emissions in future internal combustion engines. High-speed imaging is used to record the flame signal in a single-cylinder optical engine with a PFI+DI dual injection system. The premixed blue flame is identified and separated using green and blue channels in RGB images. The effects of injection timing on SDCI combustion are studied. An earlier injection strategy is found to be ideal for soot reduction; however, the ignition-injection decoupling problem results in difficulties in combustion control. It is also found that a split injection strategy has advantages in soot reduction and thermal efficiency.

Based on high EGR rate, the low temperature combustion (LTC) has been studied widely, of which the application range is more extensive than the homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) and premixed charge compression ignition (PCCI). As the high EGR rate would influence the condition of intake charge, it would also affect the combustion process and the HC emissions, thus the combustion stability of LTC would be lower than tradition diesel combustion. In this study, an ion current detecting technology was employed to explore the ion current at different EGR rates. Meanwhile, the combustion parameters were also investigated, which included the in-cylinder pressure and heat release rate. The CA50 and CAI50 were adopted as the phases of combustion and ion current, which respectively represented the crank angle of mid-point for the integrated heat release and integrated ion current. Then the correlation between CA50 and CAI50 was analysed.

Coordinated EGR-VNT control based on the intake air mass observer is presented in this paper to deal with the transient AFR control of turbocharged diesel engine. The air mass model embedded in the observer is a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy neural network trained with transient simulation results. It can predict the charged fresh air mass entering the cylinder. In a high load region, when EGR is not effective, the coordinated EGR-VNT control will also bring benefits to the transient air-fuel-ratio control. The simulation results of TDI engine model verify that the transient control strategy will allow a better control of the intake air mass, and thus improve air-fuel-ratio control and reduce NOx emission in transients.

The four-wheel-independent Electro-hydraulic Braking system (4WI EHB) is a wet type Brake-by-Wire system for passenger vehicle and is suitable for electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) to cooperate with regenerative braking. This paper gives a review on the design concepts of the 4WI EHB from the following three aspects. 1. Hydraulic architectures. 2. Design concepts of the brake actuator. 3. Installation of the components on the vehicle. Simulations and experiments are carried out to further explore the performance of hydraulic backup and implicit hardware redundancy (IHR). A method to integrate the IHR with hydraulic backup without increasing the total amount of valves is proposed, making the IHR cost and weight competitive. By reviewing various design concepts and analyzing their advantages and drawbacks, a cost and weight competitive design concept of the 4WI EHB with good fail-safe and fault-tolerant performance is proposed.

The paper presents a new electromechanical brake system for vehicles using magnetorheological fluid. The brake system designed for the electric vehicle has some advantages over the conventional brake system. The brake system is made up of a brake disk, shells, magnetorheological fluid (MRF) and the electromagnets. The brake disk is immersed in the MRF whose yield stress changes as the applied magnetic field. The braking torque of this system can be linearly adjusted by the current in just a few milliseconds without the conventional vacuum booster. This system has a quick response and precise control performance with a low hysteresis. Besides, the system has adopted the original complicated structure to save space and cost. In this paper, the configuration of MRF brake types is described. The braking torques of the MRF brakes is derived based on the MRF theoretical model which is firstly raised. Some braking simulation based on the theoretical model is also shown.

With the advantages of free from engine vacuum, wheel cylinder pressure decoupled from the brake pedal and can be regulated individually and precisely, the brake-by-wire system has a huge application potential in vehicles, especially in electric vehicles (EV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). Electro-hydraulic Brake system is the first approach towards brake-by-wire technology. This paper proposed a new compact EHB, aiming at decreasing the size, volume and cost without compromise of performance. The main components of the proposed EHB are pedal simulator, motor pump, accumulator and eight solenoid valves. An authentic model of the EHB and other key components of the brake system were established based on the test data from the test bench. A control algorithm using Round-Robin scheduling was presented to regulate the fluid pressure. Some parameters of the components were discussed to research their effects on system performance.

Biodiesel is considered one of the most promising alternative fuels to petrol fuels. In this study, an attempt has been made to investigate and compare the effect of fuel injection pressure, injection timing, and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) ratio on the particle size distributions and exhaust emissions of the diesel and biodiesel produced from waste cooking oil (WCO) used in a common rail direct injection (CRDI) diesel engine. The engine tests were conducted at two injection pressures (800 and 1600 bar), two injection timings (25 and 5 deg before top dead center (bTDC) and three EGR ratios (10%, 20% 30%) at a constant fuel injection energy per stroke and engine speed (1200 r/min). The results indicated that carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbon (HC) emissions of biodiesel were slightly lower, but nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions were slightly higher, than those of diesel fuel under most operating conditions.

Combustion behaviour and emissions characteristics of different blending ratios of diesel and gasoline fuels (Dieseline) were investigated in a light-duty 4-cylinder compression-ignition (CI) engine operating on partially premixed compression ignition (PPCI) mode. Experiments show that increasing volatility and reducing cetane number of fuels can help promote PPCI and consequently reduce particulate matter (PM) emissions while oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions reduction depends on the engine load. Three different blends, 0% (G0), 20% (G20) and 50% (G50) of gasoline mixed with diesel by volume, were studied and results were compared to the diesel-baseline with the same combustion phasing for all experiments. Engine speed was fixed at 1800rpm, while the engine load was varied from 1.38 to 7.85 bar BMEP with the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) application.

The paper is focused on the research of the automotive magneto-rheological brake system whose braking force comes from the shear stress of magneto-rheological fluid under the condition of magnetic field. The MRF brake is designed for an electric passenger car to replace a conventional hydraulic disc-type brake. The braking torque of this system can be linearly adjusted by the current in just a few milliseconds with proper materials. Therefore this system has a quick response and precise control performance with a low hysteresis. Nowadays, most of the related research of MRF is about the construction of the prototype and the realization of the brake force. Main limitation of MRF brake lies in the braking torque cannot meet the actual needs and the power consumption may be too much if it is not well designed. The prototype introduced in the SAE Brake Colloquium-31nd Annual has been manufactured and assembled critically.

Knocking is the main obstacle of increasing compression ratio to improve the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines. In this paper, the concept of stratified stoichiometric mixture (SSM) was proposed to suppress knocking in gasoline engines. The rich mixture near the spark plug increases the speed of the flame propagation and the lean mixture in the end gas suppresses the auto ignition. The overall air/fuel ratio keeps stoichiometric to solve the emission problem using three way catalysts (TWC). Moreover, both the rich zone and lean zone lead to soot free combustion due to homogeneous mixture. The effect on the knocking of homogeneous and stratified mixture was studied in a direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine using numerical simulation and experimental investigation respectively.

Brake squeal is a complex dynamics instability issue for automobile industry. Closed-loop coupling model deals with brake squeal from a perspective of structural instability. Friction characteristics between pads and disc rotor play important roles. In this paper, a closed-loop coupling model which incorporates negative friction-velocity slope is presented. Different from other existing models where the interface nodes are coupled through assumed springs, they are connected directly in the presented model. Negative friction slope is taken into account. Relationship between nodes’ frictional forces, relative speeds and brake pressure under equilibrant sliding and vibrating states is analysed. Then repeated nodal coordinate elimination and substructures’ modal coordinate space transformation of system dynamic equation are performed. It shows that the negative friction slope leads to negative damping items in dynamic equation of system.

Prototype of a brake-by-wire (BBW) system named Distributed Electro-hydraulic Braking System (DEHB) has been developed. As a BBW system, DEHB is suitable to be used in electric vehicles (EV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). Comparing to the ‘dry’ type distributed BBW systems such as Electro-mechanical Braking System (EMB) or Electric Wedge Brake (EWB), the ‘wet’ feature of DEHB brings benefits to system cost, installation, performance and reliability. In this paper, prototype of the DEHB was described. Based on its ‘wet’ feature, a new fail-safe control for DEHB was proposed. Two types of DEHB architectures that can perform the proposed fail-safe control were described. Superiority of the proposed fail-safe control and architectures for DEHB were examined and verified through simulations and HIL experiments, which helps DEHB to reach a high level of safety and reliability with reduced cost on electro/electronic redundancy.

The influence of the catalyst loading, the active components, and the size of the pellets on the conversion were discussed. Over a CeCuM′M″ catalyst at 25000h-1 the CO could be oxidized about 53.4% at 150°C. The radial distribution of the rare earth Ce, and the transitional metals M′ and M″ were homogeneous, but Cu increased gradually from the centre to outside of the pellets.

Brake squeal noise is studied in this paper by feed-in energy analysis. Based on the closed-loop coupling brake model, the computation method of feed-in energy is derived for the system squeal mode. The amount of feed-in energy can indicate the degree of squeal tendency of the brake system. Feed-in energy analysis can clearly reveal the influence of some structural parameters on brake noise, such as coefficient of friction, the geometric shape and stiffness of pads, and key substructure modal shape. It also can help to analyze the structure modification to eliminate brake squeal.

The dynamic properties of disc rotor play important role in the NVH performance of a disc brake system. Disc rotor in general is a centrosymmetric structure. It has many repeated-root modes within the interested frequency range and they may have significant influence on squeal occurrence. A pair of repeated-root modes is in nature one vibration mode. However, in current complex eigenvalue analysis model and relevant analysis methods, repeated-root modes are processed separately. This may lead to contradictory result. This paper presents methods to deal with repeated-root modes in substructure modal composition (SMC) analysis to avoid the contradiction. Through curve-fitting technique, the modal shape coefficients of repeated-root modes are expressed in an identical formula. This formula is used in SMC analysis to obtain an integrated SMC value to represent the total influence of two repeated-root modes.

Closed-loop coupling model, based on complex eigenvalue analysis, is one of the most popular and effective methods for brake squeal analysis. In the model, imaginary coupling springs are used to represent the normal contacting force between coupled nodes. Unfortunately, the physical meaning of these coupling springs was seldom discussed and there’s no systematic method to determine the value of spring stiffness. Realizing this problem, this paper, based on finite element model and modal synthesis technique, develops a new closed-loop coupling disc brake squeal model without introducing imaginary coupling springs. Different from the traditional model where two nodes at coupling interface are connected through a spring, these node-pairs in the new model are assumed to remain in tight contact during vibration. Details of the model, including force analysis, coordinate reduction and transformation and complex eigenvalue decomposition are given in this paper.

In this paper, analysis methods for brake squeal including substructure modal composition analysis and substructure modal parameters sensitivity analysis are presented. These methods are based on a new closed-loop coupling disc brake model, where the coupled nodal pairs in each coupling interface are connected tightly. This assumption is different from other existing models in literatures, where the interface nodes are coupled through assumed springs. Based on this new model, two analysis methods are derived: Substructure modal composition analysis indicates the contribution of modes of each substructure to the noise mode; Substructure modal parameters sensitivity analysis indicates the sensitivity of the real part of system’s eigenvalue to component’s modal frequency and shape. Finally, the presented analysis methods are applied to analyse a high frequency squeal problem of a squealing disc brake.

Flying cars—as a new type of vehicle for urban air mobility (UAM)—have become an important development trend for the transborder integration of automotive and aeronautical technologies and industries. This article introduces the 100-year history of flying cars, examines the current research status for UAM air buses and air taxis, and discusses the future development trend of intelligent transportation and air-to-land amphibious vehicles. Unsettled Topics Concerning Flying Cars for Urban Air Mobility identifies the major bottlenecks and impediments confronting the development of flying cars, such as high power density electric propulsion, high lift-to-drag ratio and lightweight body structures, and low-altitude intelligent flight. Furthermore, it proposes three phased goals and visions for the development of flying cars in China, suggesting the development of a flying vehicle technology innovation system that integrates automotive and aeronautic industries.

As a typical parameter of the road-vehicle interface, the road friction potential acts an important factor that governs the vehicle motion states under certain maneuvering input, which makes the prior knowledge of maximum road friction capacity crucial to the vehicle stability control systems. Since the direct measure of the road friction potential is expensive for vehicle active safety system, the evaluation of this variable by cost effective method is becoming a hot issue all these years. A ‘wheel slip based’ maximum road friction coefficient estimation method based on a modified Dugoff tire model for distributed drive electric vehicles is proposed in this paper. It aims to evaluate the road friction potential with vehicle and wheel dynamics analyzing by using standard sensors equipped on production vehicle, and fully take the advantage of distributed EV that the wheel drive torque and rolling speed can be obtained accurately.