In this study, we adopt a dual power system for extension (DPES) operation by combining the existing power system of an electric vehicle with a hydrogen fuel cell. This was to enhance the durability of the electric vehicle and reduce the inconvenience of battery charging. The lithium battery acts as the primary power source and has real-time monitoring of its state of charge (SOC), while the hydrogen fuel cells act as the auxiliary power supply. The auxiliary power can be used either directly or for charging the lithium battery while the vehicle is in its idle state. The dual power system is coupled with a dual-mode motor controller and energy management system. This study aims to apply the dual power system on the electric vehicle using hydrogen fuel cells. We designed a simulation platform for real driving conditions using Labview to send and receive control commands. In this study, we simulated the road cycles of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE-40), Japanese legislative cycle (JP10) and the World-wide Motorcycle Emissions Test Cycle (WMTC), using Proportional-integral Control (PI) for automatic tracking and employing engineering error analysis to determine the most suitable PI parameter values for the simulated system. The results showed that using a fixed 100 W fuel cell could enhance the operation time up to 21 %, 21 %, and 14 % for the road cycles of the ECE-40, JP10, and WMTC, respectively. Due to the required features of an actual vehicle, we also designed an energy limiting system to manage the driver-controlled electronic throttle by controlling the instantaneous and maximum power output of the motor in order to achieve savings in energy consumption, increase its operation time, protect the system, and enhance its durability.

The friction induced in contacts is a key feature concerning functionality of mechanisms, reliability of systems, energy consumption… Friction on soft matter occurs in many applications (tire/road contacts, touch-sensitive exploration, micro-manipulation of biological items…) as well as in nature. The latter offers various examples of how a topographic surface pattern may control friction. The result is a complex combination of phenomena: adhesion, elastic ratio of bodies in contact, viscous flow, plasticity occurrence, and topography interaction. The role of this latter phenomenon essentially lies in the splitting of the contact area between the two contacting materials and plays an important role on friction response when coupled with adhesion.

A good driving cycle is needed for accurate evaluation of a vehicle’s performance in terms of emission and fuel consumption. Driving cycles obtained for certain cities or countries are not usually applicable to other cities or countries. Therefore, considerable research has been conducted on developing driving cycles for certain cities and regions. In this paper, a driving cycle for a taxi in Amman city, the capital of Jordan, is developed. Significant differences are noted when comparing the Amman driving cycle with other driving cycles. A model of a gasoline powered vehicle is used to conduct a performance comparison in terms of fuel economy and emissions utilizing the developed Amman driving cycle and six other worldwide driving cycles. The developed Amman driving cycle is very useful in obtaining accurate estimation of fuel economy and emissions for vehicles running on Amman roads and will be used in future work to study the performance of hybrid fuel cell/ battery vehicles.

For dynamic car simulators, it is obvious that the longitudinal motion cannot be fully reproduced, the possibility to simulate longitudinal motions being generally reduced to less than 1m. In our case, a four post shaker is intended to be built as dynamic car simulator. Each post shaker, one under each car wheel, is aimed to generate mainly vertical vibrations and lateral motion. Since the displacements/motion in the longitudinal direction can only be partially reproduced, our problem was how to compensate the impossibility of fully reproducing the longitudinal motion by at least taking into account the influence of the longitudinal motion on the vertical vibrations. In this paper a simplified 4 DOF “bicycle” model is used for vertical dynamics, instead of a 7 DOF full car vertical dynamics model, which will be considered in a further study. On the other hand, the vertical vibrations are different for the same car riding on the same road, but for different acceleration regimes: 1) null acceleration (e.g., 60km/h constant speed); 2) uniform acceleration from 10 to 110 km/h (during 8 seconds), followed by uniform deceleration from 110 to 10 km/h (during another 8 sec), then uniform acceleration from 10 to 60 km/h (during the last 4 sec of the simulation). In order to reproduce in the dynamic car simulator the vertical vibrations of the above-mentioned longitudinal motion regimes (involving displacements of tens of meters), the following steps are proposed: a) direct dynamics CARSIM computer simulations of the car motion and its interaction with the road; b) inverse dynamics of car vertical model (4 degrees of freedom), using as input the following parameters computed in step a): the vertical displacements and velocities of the sprung mass and of the front and rear wheel centers as well as the pitch angle of the sprung mass and its rate. These inverse dynamics computer simulations are performed using an in-house Matlab software programming only the 4-DOF vertical car/road interaction (2D “bicycle” model in the pitch plane, no roll motion considered), without considering any longitudinal motion. The output of these inverse dynamics computer simulations, using the in-house Matlab software, is the “modified/distorted road profile”. Thus, the modifications brought to the real road profile are aimed to compensate the lack of the longitudinal degree of freedom in the dynamic car simulator, in order to reproduce the vertical vibrations of the above-mentioned longitudinal motion regimes (so that to encounter the same car vertical displacements and accelerations for the in-house Matlab simulation, as for the CARSIM simulation). Results are presented in order to show how the real road profile is modified/distorted in order to cope with this impossibility to simulate the road profile in dynamic car simulators, without huge costs.

This paper describes the on-road test program that was used for a performance study and environmental analysis of an electrically assisted bicycle in the urban area of Naples. For this purpose, the vehicle was tested on different test tracks, cycling over 2000 km, and then making a general assessment about the driving behavior under real conditions. Based on the findings obtained during the different test samples, an appraisal of the electric traction offered by this bicycle on the driving comfort was evaluated for different conditions: electrical assistance at start, on a flat road and when riding uphill. The power requirements in different typical riding situations were also calculated: these results were estimated by experimental kinematic parameters that describe the driving dynamics collected during the real-life applications. An environmental analysis was made and also put against the environmental impact of a thermal moped.

A complex system is composed of many interacting components, but the behavior of the system as a whole can be quite different from that of the individual components. An automobile is an example of a common mechanical system composed of a large number of individual components that are mechanically connected in some way and hence transmit vibrations to each other. This paper proposes a variety of inter-related analytical tools for the study of experimental data from such systems. In this work, experimental results of accelerometer data acquired at two locations in the automobile for two different kinds of tests are analyzed. One test is the response to impact on a stationary vehicle, and the other is the road-response to the vehicle being driven on a flat road at different speeds. Signals were processed via Fourier and wavelet transforms, cross-correlation coefficients were computed, and Hilbert transforms and Kuramoto order parameters were determined. A new parameter representing synchronization deficit is introduced. There is indeed some degree of synchronization that can be quantified between the accelerations measured at these two locations in the vehicle.

Very often processes associated with rotating machinery entail two general types of random processes: (i) quasi-periodic processes linked directly to the machine rotational frequency (including harmonics and sub-harmonics), and (ii) regular processes such as those associated with random vibration of machinery elements. Variability of the rotational frequency and slow-time variability can both be induced by factors such as time-varying external loading and changing thermodynamics (e.g. the influence of road grade and engine temperature on automobiles using cruise control). In this work we incorporate and extended Kalman filter (EKF) model guided by estimates of the family of AR and MV spectral estimates to arrive at a method of decomposing and tracking these two types of processes, along with related parameters (e.g. frequency jitter bandwidth/intensity and the strength, damping and natural frequency of randomly excited narrowband resonances). This work may be viewed in some ways as an extension of the work presented in [1]. Our findings include (i) for the case of constant nominal speed, the EKF estimates of the time-varying frequency, sine and colored noise processes are quite good; whereas the estimate of the time-varying amplitude is not as good, and (ii) in the case of linearly increasing speed (where the colored noise resonance behavior is only excited in that portion of the observation time where the sine frequency is in close proximity), the estimated root mean-squared errors related to both the frequency and the noise increase linearly with the nominal frequency rate of change.

In roads building, classical asphalt mix manufacturing commonly requires the heating (at 160°C) and the complete drying of aggregates. The induced energy cost has opened the way to develop alternatives processes and materials with low energy/carbon materials such as Warm Mix Asphalt (WMA). In warm mixes processes, aggregates manufacturing temperatures are different and lower than the Hot Mix ones. However, manufacturing temperature reduction can locally lead to poor bonding between bitumen and aggregate during the mixing step, due to the bitumen viscosity increasing, although bonding quality measurement remained a challenge. The aim of our study was to presents two thermal inverse methods for bonding quality assessment. These methods are based on Thermal Contact Resistance (TCR) assessment between bitumen and aggregate, during asphalt mix manufacturing. The experimental test principle consisted of heating both bitumen and cylindrical aggregate to their manufacturing temperatures (over 100°C) and to put them into contact thanks to a special experimental device. According to initial samples temperatures, heat transfer occurs from the bitumen to the aggregate. Two variants of the sequential Beck’s method were used to solve the inverse heat conduction problem. The first one consisted of determining the TCR from heat flux and temperatures and the second one consisted of identifying directly the TCR. The TCR values were interpreted as bonding quality criteria. Results showed low sensitivity to temperature measurement noise in the second variant of the inverse method. Moreover our study showed that bonding quality depends on bitumen and aggregate temperatures. The higher the component’s temperatures, the lower the TCR values and better is the bonding quality.

One of the most challenging factors in the development of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems is the imitation of an expert driver system which is the observer and interpreter of the technical system in the related driving scenario. To achieve an expert human-like situational understanding and decision making may be an important feature to fulfill the necessary active safety requirements. In this paper, an exploratory study on a multimodal adaptive driver assistance system is presented. The main goal is to determine the human driver’s attention and authority level in a cognitive model and to trigger the timely warnings according to his/her driving intents and driving skills with respect to the possible driving situation and hazard scenarios. In the previous studies, a fairly restrictive vision-based driver assistance system has been deployed to detect lane departure, blind-spot and to monitor following distance, headway time. This vision-based driver assistance system considers the driver’s driving performance metric sampled during the longitudinal and lateral vehicle control tasks as well as the processed information about the surrounding traffic environment consisting of the interactions with the other vehicles and the road situations. The presented active safety system models the driving task in a cognitive architecture and assesses the cognition of the human driver by modeling the situation awareness of the driver by using fuzzy sets. Each fuzzy set simply represents the expert driver’s perception in both of the longitudinal and lateral traffic. The presented system evaluates the driver’s driving skills and attention level by comparing the expert and human driver’s reactions suited in a finite set of decision and maneuvering task. In case of hazard analysis, the system triggers timely warnings pointing the driver’s attention at the lateral or longitudinal maneuvering tasks depending on the interpreted situation. Introductory experiments are performed with a limited number of participants, the test driving data including the driver’s perception and reaction to the surrounding vehicles and traffic situations are collected by the use of a vehicle simulator. And the presented multimodal adaptive driver assistance system is evaluated by the simulator. The preliminary results seem to be promising.

The depletion of global crude oil reserves, increases in fossil fuel prices and environmental issues have encouraged the search for and study of bio-derived fuels. For years, fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) have already been used successfully. High-quality hydrogenated vegetable oil and Fischer-Tropsch biofuels have also been developed. Fuel refining processes, however, consume energy increasing CO 2 emissions. For profitability reasons, large-scale industrial production is also required. Several distributed energy producers are instead willing to utilize various local waste materials as fuel feedstock. The target is local fuel production without any complicated manufacturing processes. Crude bio-oils are therefore also interesting fuel options, in particular for medium-speed diesel engines capable of burning such bio-oils without any major problems. Nevertheless, waste-derived crude bio-oils have also been studied in Finland in high-speed non-road diesel engines. One option has been mustard seed oil (MSO). Mustard has been cultivated in fallow fields. Non-food mustard seeds have been used for fuel manufacturing. In the performed studies with MSO, the exhaust smoke and HC emissions decreased, NO x remained approximately constant, and the thermal efficiency was competitive compared with operation on ordinary diesel fuel oil (DFO). The number of exhaust particles tended, however, to increase and deposits were formed in the combustion chamber, particularly if the engine was also run at low loads with MSO. On the whole, the results were so promising that deeper analyses of engine operation with MSO were considered reasonable. The kinematic viscosity of crude bio-oils is much higher than that of FAMEs or DFO. Consequently, the injection pressure tends to increase especially at the injection pump side of an in-line injection pump system. The flow characteristics of crude bio-oil also differ from those of DFO in the high-pressure pipe. With bio-oil, the flow seems to be laminar. The bulk modulus of bio-oils is also different from that of DFO affecting the rate of the injection pressure rise. In the present study, a turbocharged, inter-cooled direct-injection non-road diesel engine was driven with a mixture of MSO (95%) and rape seed methyl ester (RME, 5%), and standard DFO. The engine was equipped with an in-line injection pump. First, the injection pressures at pump and injector ends of the high-pressure injection pipe were measured for both fuels as a function of crank angle. Furthermore, a model was created for the injection system based on the method of characteristics. Free software called Scilab was adopted for numerical simulation of the model. Despite a few limitations in the built model, the results showed clear trends and the model can be used to predict changes in the fuel injection process when the fuel is changed.

In this paper the results of an experimental activity carried out with the aim to investigate on the frictional behaviour of visco-elastic materials in sliding contact with road asperities is presented. Experiments are carried out using a prototype of pin on disk machine whose pin is constituted by a specimen of rubber coming from a commercial tyre while the disk may be in glass, marble or abrasive paper. Tests are performed both in dry and wet conditions. Roughness of the disk materials is evaluated by a tester and by a laser scan device. Temperature in proximity of the contact patch is measured by pyrometer pointed on the disk surface in the pin trailing edge, while room temperature is measured by a thermocouple. Sliding velocity is imposed by an inverter controlled motor driving the disk and measured by an incremental encoder. Vertical load is imposed applying calibrated weights on the pin and friction coefficients are measured acquiring the longitudinal forces signal by means of a load cell. As regards to the road roughness, the experimental results show a marked dependence with road R a index. Dry and wet tests performed on different micro-roughness profiles (i.e. glass and marble) highlighted that friction coefficient in dry conditions is greater on smoother surfaces, while an opposite tendency is shown in wet conditions. Although affected by uncertainties the results confirm the dependence of friction on temperature, vertical load and track conditions.

This paper presents a method for reconstructing 3D buildings and updating Geographic Information System (GIS) data from video. We use 2D-GIS data and a ground-based video sequence as inputs. The main approach consists of three parts. In the first part, the data is captured and analyzed: besides the 2D-GIS data, we capture a video from a street view; then we can obtain thousands of3D feature points by our extracting algorithm and design a noise filter to remove outliers. In the second part, we present a generation process, which contains the footprint extraction and basic facades reconstruction. The last part is the correction and updating process: after correcting the footprint and computing the height of the building, our method will update the data into GIS. In addition, we use some user knowledge to make the results much more accurate. In the filtering and the correcting process, our method can deal with several interactive operations.

In this paper, a sliding mode control methodology is implemented for the ABS control problem. Tire-road adhesion coefficient is taken as an uncertain parameter within known limits. This allows designing a robust sliding mode controller which does not require utilization of road coefficient of adhesion information, which is difficult to measure. As an improvement over previous studies, the sliding plane is formed to include both integral and derivative terms of the slip ratio error rather than only one of them. A design routine was identified in which the integral term, the derivative term and the relay action replaced by saturation compensate for each other’s drawbacks. Simulations were carried out using a quarter car model, where hydraulic components were assumed to introduce an additional first order dynamics due to hydraulic delay. Results show that, reference tracking performance and stability benefits of the integral term, which allowed for a more flexible relay term, could be used without causing oscillations. Conversely, possible instability at low speeds caused by the derivative term could be prevented by the relaxation of the relay term by means of saturation. As a result, stable controller operation with reduced chattering at both low and high velocities is realized. Finally, the enriched set of parameters involved in the sliding plane is observed to enable the designer to shape different stages of response while maintaining stability and, partly, performance characteristics.

Lane keeping assistance systems help the driver in following the lane centerline. While lane keeping assistance systems are available in some mass production vehicles, they have not found widespread use and are not as common as ESP or ACC at the moment. Lane keeping assistance systems still need further development. Previously available systems have to be continuously adapted to newer vehicle models and fully tested after this adaptation. An image processing algorithm for lane detection and tracking, a lane keeping assistance controller design and a real time hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulator developed for testing the designed lane keeping assistance system are therefore presented in this paper. The high fidelity, high order, realistic and nonlinear vehicle model in Carmaker HiL runs as software in a real time simulation on a dSpace compact simulator with the DS1005 and DS2210 boards. A PC is used for processing video frames coming from an in-vehicle camera pointed towards the road ahead. Lane detection and tracking computations including fitting of composite Bezier curves to curved lanes are carried out on this PC. In the present setup, the camera used is a virtual camera attached to the virtual vehicle in Carmaker and provides video frames from the Carmaker animation screen. A dSpace microautobox is available for obtaining the lane data from the PC and the Carmaker vehicle data from the dSpace compact simulator and calculating the required steering actions and sending them to the Carmaker vehicle model. The lane keeping controller is designed in the Matlab toolbox COMES using parameter space techniques. The motivation behind this approach is to develop the lane keeping assistance system as much as possible in a laboratory hardware-in-the-loop setting before time consuming, expensive and potentially dangerous road testing. Lane detection, tracking and curved lane fit results, hardware-in-the-loop simulation results of the lane keeping controller with the image processing system are are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, the dynamic behavior of a quarter-car with two degree-of-freedom which consists of sprung mass and unsprung mass is examined. Nonlinearity occurred due to nonlinear hysteretic suspension damper and spring. Vehicle tire is modeled as a nonlinear hardening spring. The disturbance of road assumed to be sinusoid. Frequency response diagram of the model has been obtained. Results show that the dynamic response of the vehicle can be chaotic. Influence of road roughness amplitude on vehicle vibration is investigated and critical amplitude of the road surface profile is found, above which the system can vibrate chaotically. The comparison between the results obtained from the proposed model and those from the single degree-of-freedom quarter-car model shows that the unsprung mass has great influence on the dynamical behavior of the system, which cannot be ignored.

A novel semi-active control system for suspension systems of passenger car using Magnetorheological (MR) damper is introduced. The suspension system is considered as a massspring model with an eight-degrees-of-freedom, a passive damper and an active damper. The semi-active vibration control is designed to reduce the amplitude of automotive vibration caused by the alteration of road profile. The control mechanism is designed based on the optimal control algorithm, Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). In this system, the damping coefficient of the shock absorber changes actively trough inducing magnetic field. It is observed that utilizing the present control algorithm may significantly reduce the vibration response of the passenger car, thus, providing comfortable drive. The new developed suspension system may lead to design and manufacturing of passenger car in which the passenger may not feel the changes in road profile from highly bumpy to smooth profile.

Automotive engine mounts are used to protect engine from road irregularities and to isolate transmission of vibrations created by the engine which have a drastic effect on the noise generated inside the passenger cabin. Most common types of engine mounts are elastomeric and hydraulic mounts, the former having better vibration isolation characteristics whereas the latter displays better shock isolation. Elastomeric mounts are widely used for their low initial cost, while hydraulic mounts with inertia track and decoupler are chosen for their good vibration isolation and shock excitation characteristics. However, hydraulic mounts with inertia track and decoupler are not appropriate for small segment and commercial vehicles due to their high initial cost. In this paper, the effect of the addition of a dry friction damper on the performance of elastomeric automobile engine mounts is investigated. Results showed that addition of dry friction damping to the elastomeric engine mount significantly improves the transmissibility throughout a wide frequency range where the best results are obtained at the resonance frequency.

In this paper, a control oriented rational tire model is developed and incorporated in a two-track vehicle dynamics model for the prospective design of vehicle dynamics controllers. The tire model proposed in this paper is an enhancement over previous rational models which have taken into account only the peaking and saturation behavior disregarding all other force generation characteristics. Simulation results have been conducted to compare the dynamics of a vehicle model equipped with a Magic Formula tire model, a rational tire model available in the literature and the present rational tire model. It has been observed that the proposed tire model results in vehicle responses that closely follow those obtained with the Magic Formula even for extreme driving scenarios conducted on roads with low adhesion coefficient.

In this article, the gear ratio of RD (An Iranian made car by Iran Khodro Co.) vehicle gearbox with considering fuel economy and gearbox specifications is evaluated. In the first step, the gearbox advantages and its effects on the engine rotational velocity with considering road load and engine torque are investigated. It is distinguished that in a specified velocity of vehicle, engine speed in overdrive state is very lower than engine speed in fourth gear. It means that noise and fuel consumption and engine wearing and damages will be decreased. The optimized region of engine operation is identified. Using a geometric progression between automotive gear ratios and entering number of effective parameters such as specific fuel consumption, minimum mean effective velocity, and etc., overdrive gear ratio is computed. Finally the overdrive gear ratio is chosen 0.81 for vehicle.

In this study, a double wishbone suspension mechanism is modeled attached to a body representing a quarter-car. Quarter car models have been studied extensively in the literature using lumped parameter models usually represented as simple systems made of sprung masses, springs, dampers and unsprung masses. In reality suspension mechanisms consists of control arms, which contribute significantly to the response of the overall system. Considering more complex models system including suspension mechanism usually simulation software are used. The main purpose of this study is to derive and to develop the quarter car’s mathematical model including a suspension mechanism in matrix form, and to use this model simulating and investigating various types of studies. First a mathematical model of the double A arm suspension attached to a car mass is generated and the resulting computer simulations are obtained in MATLAB. Second the same model is created using Adams/View software to validate the mathematical model simulation results. In order to get the realistic responses of the suspension system to the road input, the spectral descriptions are used for generating artificial road profiles. Two types of optimization process are performed, one concerning the dimensional optimization of the mechanism (kinematic/geometric mechanism optimization), the other concerning the nonlinear characteristics of the suspension elements namely coil spring and viscous damper (dynamic ride optimization). In the kinematical optimization, the camber angular deviation and the roll center height are taken into account as the weighted objective function. Considering optimization of the nonlinear characteristics of the damper and the spring, the passenger comfort and the car handling measures are taken into account using ISO 2631 weighting standard. Finally, actuators are included in the model in order to increase the ride comfort by an active control scheme. Two actuators are inserted, one is under the driver seat the other is in the A arm mechanism to form an active suspension. A PID control scheme is used to increase ride comfort. These steps also show that, even though it is cumbersome to obtain the simulations of a realistic mathematical model of a commonly used system; once the simulation model is established, it is easy to perform several types of the studies at once.