Automotive Science and Engineering

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In the present paper, a complete literatures review of thermal barrier coating applications in diesel engines is performed to select a proper type and to find coating effects. The coating system has effects on the fuel consumption, the power and the combustion efficiency, pollution contents and the fatigue lifetime of engine components. Usually there are several beneficial influences by applying ceramic layers on the combustion chamber, including the piston, the cylinder head, the cylinder block, intake and exhaust valves by using a plasma thermal spray method. Several disadvantages such as producing nitrogen oxides also exist when a coating system is used. In this article, all effects, advantages and disadvantages of thermal barrier coatings are investigated based on presented articles.

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Running the industrial components at a proper temperature is always a big challenge for engineers. Internal combustion engines are among these components in which temperature plays a big role in their performance and emissions. With the development of new technology in the fields of ‘nano-materials’ and ‘nano-fluids’, it seems very promising to use this technology as a coolant in the internal combustion engines. In this study, a nano-fluid (Al2O3-Water/Ethylene Glycol (EG)) is used as an engine coolant along with an optimized heat exchanger to reduce the warm-up timing. The effect of nano-fluid concentration is considered here by using their corresponding governing equations, such as momentum and energy. The engine coolant thermal behavior calculation is carried out based on the lumped method. The obtained results indicated that using different percentage of nano-fluid mixtures (by volume), such as Al2O3- Water/EG as engine coolant enhances the heat transfer coefficient and reduces the warm-up timing which, in turn, results in reduced emissions and fuel consumption.

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Cooled exhaust gas recirculation is emerging as a promising technology to address the increasing demand for fuel economy without compromising performance in turbocharged spark injection engines. The objectives of this study are to quantify the increase in knock resistance and to decrease the enrichment and emission at high load. For this purpose four stroke turbo charged Spark Ignition engine (EF7-TC) including its different systems such as inlet and exhaust manifold, exhaust pipe and engine geometry are modeled using GT Power Software. As predicted, using cooled EGR at high load enabled operation at lambda near to one with the same serial engine performances, which offers substantial advantages Such As BSFC reduction (up to 14%), and emission reduction (CO, NOx).

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Many studies have been done on hybrid vehicles in the past few years. The full hybrid vehicles need a large number of batteries creating up to 300 (V) to meet the required voltage of electric motor. The size and weight of the batteries cause some problems. This research investigates the mild hybrid vehicle. This vehicle includes a small electric motor and a high power internal combustion engine. In most cases the car’s driving force is created by an internal combustion part. A small electric motor, which can operate as engine starter, generator and traction motor, is located between the engine and an automatically shifted multi-gear transmission (gearbox). The clutch is used to disconnect the gearbox from the engine when needed such as during gear shifting and low vehicle speed. The power rating of the electric motor may be in the range of about 15% of the IC engine power rating. The electric motor can be smoothly controlled to operate at any speed and torque, thus, isolation between the electric motor and transmission is not necessary. The present study evaluates the properties of the mild hybrid vehicle, its structure and performance and proposes an energy control model for its optimum operation.

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Among human activities, motor vehicles play the most important role in air pollution. Air pollution has negative impacts on people and on the environment. In this paper the effect of oxygen-enriched air (20.8%, 21.8%, 22.8%, 23.8% and 24.8%) and different bioethanol-gasoline blends (zero, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25%) in different engine speeds (1000 rpm, 2000 rpm and 3000 rpm) on the amount of pollutants, particles, and fuel consumption were studied. To do so, a four-cylinder, four-stroke gasoline engine with Siemens fueling system was used. The results showed that when oxygen percentage in the inlet increased from 20.8% to 24.8%, the average amount of UHC, CO, fuel consumption and the number of fine and coarse particles decreased 126.75%, 11.25%, 17.02%, 77.37% and 243.25%, respectively, while the amount of CO2 and NOX increased 5.36% and 113.27%, respectively. Also the results showed that when bioethanol percentage in the mixture increased from zero to 25%, the average amount of UHC, CO2, CO and the number of fine and coarse particles decreased 104.53%, 3.45%, 34.57%, 41.42% and 96.09%, respectively, while the amount of NOX and fuel consumption increased 163.41% and 15.75%, respectively.

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In this paper an idea for hybridization of conventional vehicles has proposed. The case study performed on one of the common vehicles on country roads i.e. Samand. This vehicle has high production volume but low fuel performance therefore hybridization of it could be attractive for its manufacture. This paper aims that the hybridization idea and its structure to need minimum mechanical modifications. In consequence attractiveness of this idea for industry could be high. A cost optimization has been performed for sizing of additional components such as electric motors and battery modules and the simulation results has been adopted to verify the proposed idea for case study with hybrid simulation of GT-Suit and MATLAB softwares.      

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This study uses real driving cycles of a city bus and a standard driving cycle “WLTP” to implement a full comparison for energy demand and fuel consumption for different propulsion systems (i.e., Diesel ICE, Fuel cell and Electric engines). To better understand the comparison, a life cycle assessment is conducted using “GREET” and “GHGenius” software, which represents a clear demonstration of side effects and emissions of each engine on the environment. The results show that for “WLTP” cycle the bus needs 2423kJ energy for traveling each kilometer while the averaged amount of energy for traveling one kilometer of real driving cycle reaches to 1708kJ. By computing total energy use of  an electric bus we conclude, electric buses use almost 58% of electric energy for driving and the rest is lost. Then fuel cell and internal combustion engine buses have energy efficiency of 36% and 24% respectively. Concerning LCA analysis, it becomes apparent that unlike efficiency, electric buses are not environmentally benign as fuel cell buses. LCA analysis showed that fuel cell buses that use steam reforming hydrogen production process are a cleaner option than electric buses. Finally, since diesel buses produce the most emission, especially CO2, and consume the most energy in the total life cycle, they have no advantage for public transportation fleet.

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Reducing the fuel consumption and energy use in transportation systems are the active research areas in recent years. This paper considers the repetitive mission of the intercity passenger buses as a case for fuel reduction. A look-ahead energy management system is proposed which uses the information about the geometry and speed limits of the road ahead. This data can be extracted using road slope and speed limits database in combination with a GPS unit. A fuzzy gain scheduling algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the look-ahead control. The road slope and speed limit specifications called road pattern can define some two dimensional regions. The main parameters of the proposed fuzzy look-ahead controller are optimized in each region using the genetic algorithm.  The final output of the proposed controller is the desired speed that regularly is fed to the conventional cruise controller with new set points. The simulation results of the proposed energy management system show that the fuel consumption is significantly reduced.

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In this paper, an adaptive cruise control system is designed that is controlled by a neural network model. This neural network model is trained with data resulting from the simulation of a multi-objective nonlinear predictive adaptive cruise control system. For this purpose, first, an adaptive cruise control system was designed using the concept of model predictive control based on a nonlinear model to maintain the desired speed of the driver, maintain a safe distance with the car in front, reducing fuel consumption and increasing ride comfort. Due to the time-consuming computations in predictive control systems and the consequent need for powerful and expensive hardware, it was decided to use the extracted data from the simulation of this designed cruise control system to train a neural network model and use this model to achieve control objectives instead of the predictive controller. Using the neural network model in the cruise control system, despite a significant reduction in computation time, the control objectives were well achieved, and in fact a combination of model predictive controller accuracy and neural network controller speed was used.

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This paper introduces a novel powertrain system composed of a liquid ammonia internal combustion engine, a dissociation and separation unit, and a PEM fuel cell system developed for vehicular applications. Using a carbon-free fuel for the ICE and producing hydrogen on board for PEMFC use significantly enhance this novel systemchr('39')s environmental effects. The thermodynamic analyses are conducted using EES and MATLAB software. The results show that while this hybrid powertrain system produces 120 kW output power, energy and exergy efficiencies are 45.2% and 43.1%, respectively. The overall exergy destruction rate of the system becomes 237.4 kW.The fuel consumption, engine speed, and battery state of charge (SoC) analyses are calculated using three driving cycles. These vehicles consume 7.9, 5.7, and 7.7 liters of liquid ammonia per 100 km in FTP-75, NEDC, and HWFET driving cycles, respectively. The battery state of charge differentiation in these three cycles shows the practicality of this novel powertrain system specially in inner-city driving cycles as the battery does not confront any intense decline of SOC to the minimum level. HWFET results show the great dependence of the vehicle on ICE and low PEM fuel cell function, which results in releasing decomposed hydrogen to the environment.

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Environmental pollution and reduction of fossil fuel resources can be considered as the most important challenges for human society in the recent years. The results of previous studies show that the main consumer of fossil fuels and, consequently, most of the air pollutants, is related to the transportation industry and especially cars. The increasing growth of vehicles, the increase in traffic and the decrease in the average speed of inner-city vehicles have led to a sharp increase in fuel consumption. To address this problem, automakers have proposed the development and commercialization of hybrid vehicles as an alternative to internal combustion vehicles. In this paper, the design of an energy management system in a fuel-cell hybrid vehicle based on the look-ahead fuzzy control is considered. The preparation of fuzzy rules and the design of membership functions is based on the fuel efficiency curve of the fuel-cell. In look-ahead fuzzy control, the ahead conditions of the vehicle are the basis for decision in terms of slope and speed limit due to path curves as well as battery charge level. The fuzzy controller will determine the on or off status of the fuel-cell, as well as the power required. The motion of the fuel-cell hybrid vehicle on a real road is simulated and the performance of the proposed look-ahead controller is compared with the base controller (thermostatic method). The simulation results show that using the proposed approach can reduce the fuel consumption of the fuel-cell hybrid vehicle as well as travel time.

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This study examines the impact of a fuzzy logic-based control strategy on managing peak power consumption in the auxiliary power unit (APU) of a hybrid electric bus. The APU comprises three components: an air compressor, a power steering system, and an air conditioning system (AC) connected to an electric motor. Initially, these components were simulated in MATLAB-SIMULINK software. While the first two were deemed dependent and independent of vehicle speed, respectively, the stochastic behavior of the steering was emulated using the Monte Carlo method. Subsequently, a fuzzy controller was designed and incorporated into the APU to prevent simultaneous operation of the three accessories as much as possible. The results of repeated simulations demonstrated that the designed fuzzy controller effectively distributed the operation of the accessories throughout the driving cycle, thereby reducing overlaps in auxiliary loads. Consequently, the APU's average and maximum power consumption exhibited significant reductions. Furthermore, through multiple simulations with an upgraded power system model integrating the new APU-controller package, it was established that the proposed strategy for managing auxiliary loads in the bus led to lower fuel consumption and emissions.