Search Results

A methodology for the generation of representative driving cycles is proposed and evaluated. The proposed method combines traffic simulation and driving behavior modeling to generate mission-based driving cycles. Extensions to the existing behavioral model in a traffic simulation tool are suggested and parameterized for different driver categories to capture the effects of road geometry and variances between drivers. The evaluation results illustrate that the developed extensions significantly improve the match between driving data and the driving cycles generated by traffic simulation. Using model extensions parameterized for different driver categories, instead of only one average driver, provides the possibility to represent different driving behaviors and further improve the realism of the resulting driving cycles.

Rollover has for long been a major safety concern for trucks, and will be even more so as automated driving is envisaged to becoming a key element of future mobility. A natural way to address rollover is to extend the capabilities of current active-safety systems with a system that intervenes by steering or braking actuation when there is a risk of rollover. Assessing and predicting the rollover is usually performed using rollover indices calculated either from lateral acceleration or lateral load transfer. Since these indices are evaluated based on different physical observations it is not obvious how they can be compared or how well they reflect rollover events in different situations. In this paper we investigate the implication of the above mentioned rollover indices in different critical maneuvers for a heavy 8×4 twin-steer truck.

Present two stroke engines used for hand held power tools must confirm to prevailing emission legislation. A fact is that today the engines have to be run at leaner air fuel setting resulting in less amount of lubrication oil passing through the engine. This lean mixture combined with high mixture trapping efficiency also affects the combustion, raising the overall working temperature of the engine. So to gain more robustness out of these air-cooled power heads one viable route is to use different coatings to take control of tribology and heat management within the two stroke power head. In this paper a first discussion and description of the different coatings and their merits to the air cooled two stroke engine is conducted. Furthermore engine data for the test engine, in this case a 70cc professional chainsaw are presented. The outcome of engine dyno testing of the different coatings are presented and analyzed for further discussion.

In recent years the need for testing, calibration and certification of automotive components and powertrains have increased, partly due to the development of new hybrid concepts. At the same time, the development within electrical drives enables more versatile chassis dynamometer setups with better accuracy at a reduced cost. We are developing a new chassis dynamometer laboratory for vehicle research, aiming at extending a recently commercially available dynamometer, building a new laboratory around it, and applying the resulting facility to some new challenging vehicle research problems. The projects are enabled on one hand by collaboration with the dynamometer manufacturer, and on the other hand on collaboration with automotive industry allowing access to relevant internal information and equipment. The test modes of the chassis dynamometer are under development in a joint collaboration with the manufacturer.

Hybridization and velocity management are two important techniques for energy efficiency that mainly have been treated separately. Here they are put in a common framework that from the hybridization perspective can be seen as an extension of the equivalence factor idea in the well known strategy ECMS. From the perspective of look-ahead control, the extension is that energy can be stored not only in kinetic energy, but also electrically. The key idea is to introduce more equivalence factors in a way that enables efficient computations, but also so that the equivalence factors have a physical interpretation. The latter fact makes it easy to formulate a good residual cost to be used at the end of the look-ahead horizon. The formulation has different possible uses, but it is here applied on an evaluation of the size of the electrical system. Previous such studies, for e.g.

For a fuel optimal gear shift control, when look ahead information is available, the impact of the automated manual transmission (AMT) gear-shifting process is analyzed. For a standard discrete heavy truck transmission, answers are found on when to shift gears, prior to or when in an uphill slope. The gear-shifting process of a standard AMT is modeled in order to capture the fuel and time aspects of the gear shift. A numerical optimization is performed by dynamic programming, minimizing fuel consumption and time by controlling fuel injection and gear. Since a standard AMT does not have look ahead information, it sometimes gears down unnecessarily and thus gives a significantly higher fuel consumption compared to the optimal control. However, if gearing down is inevitable, the AMT gear-shifting strategy, based on engine thresholds, is well-functioning so that the optimal control only gives marginal additional savings.

In modern Diesel engines Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and Variable Geometry Turbochargers (VGT) have been introduced to meet the new emission requirements. A control structure that coordinates and handles emission limits and low fuel consumption has been developed. This controller has a set of PID controllers with parameters that need to be tuned. To be able to achieve good performance, an optimization based tuning method is developed and tested. In the optimization the control objectives are captured by a cost function. To aid the tuning a systematic method has been developed for selecting representative and significant transients that excite different modes in the controller. The performance is evaluated on the European Transient Cycle. It is demonstrated how weighting factors in the cost function influence control behavior, and that the proposed tuning method gives a significant improvement in control performance compared to standardized tuning methods for PID controllers.

The problem addressed is how to drive a heavy truck over various road topographies such that the fuel consumption is minimized. Using a realistic model of a truck powertrain, an optimization problem for minimization of fuel consumption is formulated. Through the solutions of this problem optimal speed profiles are found. An advantage here is that explicit analytical solutions can be found, and this is done for a few constructed test roads. The test roads are constructed to be easy enough to enable analytical solutions but still capture the important properties of real roads. In this way the obtained solutions provide explanations to some behaviour obtained by ourselves and others using more elaborate modeling and numeric optimization like dynamic programming. The results show that for level road and in small gradients the optimal solution is to drive with constant speed.

New and exciting possibilities in vehicle control are revealed by the consideration of topography, for example through the combination of GPS and three dimensional road maps. How information about future road slopes can be utilized in a heavy truck is explored. The aim is set at reducing the fuel consumption over a route without increasing the total travel time. A model predictive control (MPC) scheme is used to control the longitudinal behavior of the vehicle, which entails determining accelerator and brake levels and also which gear to engage. The optimization is accomplished through discrete dynamic programming. A cost function that weighs fuel use, negative deviations from the reference velocity, velocity changes, gear shifts and brake use is used to define the optimization criterion. Computer simulations back and forth on 127 km of a typical highway route in Sweden, show that the fuel consumption in a heavy truck can be reduced with 2.5% with a negligible change in travel time.

Inverse dynamic simulation is a successful method to make fast simulations of powertrains modeled using vehicle velocity and acceleration. This method is here extended so that additional dynamics can be included, and it is compared to the standard/usual forward dynamic simulation. Simulation results show that extended inverse dynamic simulation is a good method for maintaining speed and increasing accuracy in simulations. This gives the possibility to use the inverse dynamic simulation as a tool for powertrain optimization and control strategy evaluation.

Rolling resistance of inflated tires is a factor that contributes to the total load and fuel consumption of a vehicle. Therefore, models of rolling resistance is an important area within computer simulations of vehicles used to predict fuel consumption and emissions. In these applications the coefficient of rolling resistance is usually described as a function of velocity. We have earlier shown that this is not a satisfactory solution [1, 2]. In this paper it is demonstrated that the temperature of the tires is a dominating factor for rolling resistance in real driving. The tires typically start at ambient temperature and are then warmed up by the heat generated in the tire. As the temperature increases the rolling resistance decreases (to some limit). After a long period (2 hours for truck tires) of driving at constant conditions, a stationary temperature (and rolling resistance) is reached.

Spark ignited engines require accurate control of both air and fuel, and one important component in this system is the throttle servo. A non-linear throttle model is built and used for control design. It is shown that the non-linear model-based controller improves the performance compared to a conventional gain scheduled PI controller. Furthermore a method for estimating the load torque that the air flow produces on the throttle shaft is presented.

One important area of SI-engine diagnosis is the diagnosis of leakage in the air-intake system. This is because a leakage can cause increased emissions and drivability problems. A method for accurately detecting leaks is presented. The results are developed for a turbo-charged engine but they are also valid for a naturally aspirated SI-engine. The method is based on a physical model of the leaks and includes an estimation of leakage area. By knowing the area, it is possible to reconfigure the control algorithm such that, the effect of the leak on emissions, is suppressed. As small leaks as 2 mm in diameter can be detected and it is possible to distinguish between leakages before or after the throttle. The method is suitable for on-line implementation.

Driveline control is a challenging area. With traditional fuel metering systems, driveline oscillations may follow load disturbances or changes in accelerator position. This problem, emphasized with increased engine power, together with overall increased performance demands leads to a need for more advanced driveline control. The main contribution of the paper is a strategy for fuel metering with active handling of driveline resonances, reducing wheel speed oscillations. Experiments and modeling using a 6x2 heavy truck lead to a linear model capturing the significant torsional resonances in the driveline. A formulation tractable for analysis, design, and implementation is developed. Field trials show that the engine can be controlled to reduce low frequency driveline oscillations, also when facing engine torque restrictions due to diesel smoke reduction. The system thus improves both performance and driveability.

By using engine controlled gear shifting, a manual transmission can be automated without using the clutch during the shift event. The main contribution of this paper is a novel extension of the existing system using active handling of driveline resonances. The strategy is based on a model of the transmission torque, which is derived by using experimental data from a heavy truck. A key step is the design of a criterion for a controller that drives the transmission torque to zero with damped resonances and with a control signal realizable by the engine. The proposed solution offers a possibility to optimize the time needed for a gear shift, which is important since the vehicle is free rolling when in gear-shift condition. Furthermore, neutral gear can successfully be engaged also when facing initial driveline oscillations and load disturbances.

The main result of this paper is a real-time closed loop demonstration of spark advance control by interpretation of ionization current signals. The advantages of such a system is quantified. The ionization current, obtained by using the spark plug as a sensor, is rich on information, but the signal is also complex. A key step in our method is to use parameterized functions to describe the ionization current [1]. The results are validated on a SAAB 2.3 1, normally aspirated, production engine, showing that the placement of the pressure trace relative to TDC is controlled using only the ionization current for feedback.

Because of legislative regulations like OBDII, on-board diagnosis has gained much interest lately. A model based approach is suggested for the diagnosis of the air intake system of an SI-engine. Important research issues are modeling concepts, residual generation and evaluation, overall performance, and limiting factors. The diagnosis system is based on a non-linear semi-physical model and uses a combination of different residual generation methods. It is capable of detecting and isolating faults in the throttle actuator, throttle sensor, air mass now sensor and manifold pressure sensor. The scheme is experimentally validated on a real production engine.

Spark advance setting in spark-ignited engines is used to place the in-cylinder pressure curve relative to the top dead center. It is demonstrated that ionization current interpretation is feasible to use for spark advance control to optimize engine performance. A feedback scheme, not a calibration scheme, based on ionization current is proposed. It is thus related to pressure sensor feedback schemes, that have reported good results, but have not yet proven cost effective due to the cost of the pressure sensor. The method proposed here is very cost effective since it uses exactly the same hardware and instrumentation (already used in production cars) that is used to utilize the spark plug as a sensor to detect misfire and as a sensor for knock control. The only addition for ignition control is further signal interpretation in the electronic engine control unit. A key idea in our method is to use parameterized functions to describe the ionization current.