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The driving conditions of commercial logistics vehicles have the characteristics of combined urban and suburban roads with relatively fixed mileage and cargo load alteration, which affect the vehicular fuel economy. To this end, an adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy (A-ECMS) with vehicle speed and weight recognition is proposed to improve the fuel economy for a range-extender electric van for logistics in this work. The driving conditions are divided into nine representative groups with different vehicle speed and weight statuses, and the driving patterns are recognized with the use of the bagged trees algorithm through vehicle simulations. In order to generate the reference SOC near the optimal values, the optimal SOC trajectories under the typical driving cycles with different loads are solved by the shooting method and the optimal slopes for these nine patterns are obtained.

Despite advances in automated driving systems and their potential help many mobility users who cannot drive, significant barriers remain regarding accessibility for emerging technology vehicles. These barriers exist in the design of vehicles and affect boarding, accessing pick-up and drop-off points, and traveling to a vehicle location. The accessibility of automated mobility services hinges on an interdependent set of vehicle design and infrastructure issues, both digital and physical. Automated Vehicles and Infrastructure Enablers: Accessibility highlights the development status of accessible vehicles and services, considers approaches to vehicle design that allow for increased accessibility, and examines the ways in which infrastructure can open the door to automated mobility for disabled customers. Use cases for accessible automated mobility service include local bus, paratransit, and robotaxis. Click here to access the full SAE EDGETM Research Report portfolio.

Lift axles of heavy commercial vehicles are deployed to handle increased payload. These axles of Commercial vehicles are made of low alloy carbon steel materials. Lift axles are designed in hollow condition for weight reduction opportunity. Two types of tube materials are used for the manufacturing of lift axles. These are either Cold Drawn Seamless (CDS) tubes or Hot Finished Seamless (HFS) tube material. The vanadium micro-alloyed steel grade, 20MnV6 is an excellent choice for the manufacturing of lift axles. The 20MnV6 has favorable mechanical properties for lift axles and also offers good weldability. However, lift axles made of 20MnV6 when manufactured in hot-finished condition, shows significant scatter in terms of durability performance. This requires further heat treatment of 20MnV6 to be deployed for reducing the scatter in the material properties to reduce scatter in durability performance and thus increasing the reliability of the lift axles.

To meet stringent emission norms and commercial vehicle customer demands, the selection of an after-treatment system (ATS) plays a considerable role. Therefore, the selected ATS should substantially reduce nitrogen oxide emission by proper decomposition of ammonia and particulate matter without significantly increasing the thermal stress on DPF. Though the BS-VI after-treatment architecture is derived from EURO-VI, only a certain level of technology for the vehicle operating conditions in India can be implemented. However, numerous vehicle operating condition challenges in the Indian market must be explicated. Correspondingly, it should be addressed with a robust durability validation methodology to enhance the ATS product performance in challenging environments. This paper discusses SCR catalysts emission performance and ammonia decomposition durability validation methodology for commercial vehicles.

Major share of Small Commercial Vehicles (SCV) applications is operated in city conditions with frequent stops and short driving distance. Drivers will often operate these SCV with loads that exceed their rated specifications. Such driving profiles are particularly observed in food, e-commerce delivery, garbage collection vehicles which are driven inside the city. During Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) regeneration events in these conditions, it is a challenge to maintain light-off temperature of oxidation catalyst. This may lead to prolonged regeneration durations with multiple regeneration interrupts and poor regeneration efficiency. Frequent engine start operations and lower passive regeneration result in a low regeneration interval. The extended DPF regeneration duration in combination with a low regeneration interval will result in high oil dilution. The study focuses on identifying such driving profiles and defining counter measures to improve the regeneration performance.

Thermal management in off road vehicles is critical because it directly or indirectly affects engine performance, fuel economy, safety, and emission. With the introduction of stringent exhaust emission norms such as the EU stage V and EPA Final Tier 4, modern engines use a Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) to trap the soot particles present in the exhaust gases. These soot particles are burned using a process called regeneration where skin temperature of DPF increases beyond 400 °C. Situation becomes more worst when the vehicle is shutdown just after the regeneration, where the coolant fan is off and there is no active airflow. Hot air gets trapped and start increasing under hood temperature, affecting the performance of other sub systems like air intake, electrical components, aftertreatment sensors etc. There are several ways to manage this heat load. Normally the heat built up in the under-hood compartment escape to the environment by two paths - convection and radiation.

Out of every 135,000 used tires purchased, only 8,000 make it to the final stage to be made reusable [1]. The cost for purchasing, handling, transporting as well as inspection by experts results in heavy losses accrued which demotivates both individuals as well as organisations from adopting such recycling strategies. Here we propose a solution which will help reduce the cost as well make the process efficient and time saving. For identifying reusable truck tires effectively and prevent discarding of completely fine tires, deep learning is used to realise the image recognition of good and scrap truck tires. Firstly, Shearography Tire testing is done in the production laboratory or on the test track. Vacuum chamber measuring system helps- in taking multiple pictures of tires. Then image enhancement and data preprocessing are used to augment images, then these were input into the network for training.

This study investigated the exhaust particle and unregulated emissions emanating from a heavy duty six-cylinder natural gas engine with CNG and HCNG fuels. Experiments were performed at different speeds (1000, 1500, 2000 and 2500 rpm) and load conditions (30%, 50%, 75% and 100%). Exhaust gas samples at each speed-load combination were analyzed for particle number concentration and particle size distribution using engine exhaust particle sizing spectrometer. Unregulated emissions were also measured using FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) analyzer. The results indicated that particle number (PN) concentration in exhaust is comparatively lower with HCNG fuel than CNG and it increases with increase in engine speed-load. At higher speed-load condition, engine emits high nucleation mode particles (NMP) and ultrafine particles (UFP). Total PN concentration in the NMP range is comparatively higher than UFP and accumulated mode particles (AMP) for both the test fuels.

The changing mobility landscape of India reveals that the erstwhile transport modes of the 20th century i.e., railways and road buses are making way for airlines, personal vehicles, shared mobility, metro rails. Rapid technological changes, stricter regulations, new transport cultures autonomous, connected, electric and shared (ACES), state-of-the-art and environmental concerns are shaping up the eco-system for automobiles. Despite these challenges roadways and automobiles will continue to be most prominent solution in India for future. But for that, the automobile sector should be agile, innovative, and adaptable to changing eco-system, vigilant to thwart threat of alternate mobility solutions and must provide sustainable solutions for the future. The purpose of this paper to evaluate various mobility solutions, ascertain prominence of upcoming automobile solutions and their sustainability for future in India.

Nowadays, the technology war always shows the need for rushing hours in the transportation sector. Turbines and IC engines, which generate power, can only be operated with the help of high-pressure air. In this research, an analytical study introduces an innovative boat vehicle driven by air-water interactions. The principles of an OWC (Oscillating Water Column) wave energy converter device is reviewed to find the effects of air-water interactions that are the key concepts for introducing the partially levitated transportation method. The physical conditions around the boat vehicle, such as squat conditions and speed variations, are reviewed under different stream conditions to explore the possibilities of converting the potential energy of water into kinetic energy under dynamic conditions. An experimental Froude - model analysis is presented to find the velocity and kinetic energy at upstream and downstream conditions of the channel.

The US American government introduced a law to mandatorily equip passenger vehicles with rear view cameras. Furthermore, US NCAP presented a test for passenger vehicles to brake on pedestrians while back up. These two circumstances lead to main motivation of the development of the Comfort Backup Assist (CBUA). Nevertheless, more and more passenger cars in general are being equipped with rear view cameras. Rear view system (RVS) allows to deliver a rear-view camera system including a braking functionality which is intended to make the driving mission safer and reduce the number of accidents in parking driving situations. RVS also focus on vehicle safety by reducing accidents while taking reversing/parking scenarios and to provides slow de-acceleration of the vehicle gradually to avoid jerk and increase the ride comfort.

Simulation of real time situations is a time tested software validation methodology in the automotive industry and array of simulation technologies have been in use for decades and is widely accepted and been part & parcel of software development cycle. While software that is being developed needs detailed plan, architecture and detailed design, it also matters during its development that, it is built in the right way from the very beginning and is fine tuned constantly. Especially for Software-In-Loop simulation (SIL), plenty of practices/tools/techniques/data are being used for simulation of system/software behavior. When it comes to choosing the right simulation technique and tools to be adopted, often there are discussions revolve around cost, feasibility, effectiveness, man-power, scalability, reusability etc.

The hybrid structure of Engine Mounts made of rubber casing with cast iron reinforcing. Use of two materials made it unique both in application and testing. The rubber provides damping for engine vibrations and the cast iron provides necessary strengthening to hold the heavy engine in place. In this research paper the FEA (Finite Element Method) methodology is being discussed to evaluate and optimize the design analysis to enhance overall engine mount capacity. The existing and modified designs are validated and considerable improvement is being observed in modified design in physical testing. Accurate modeling of engine mounts assembly is presented in this paper. FEA analysis results have good correlation with physical validation for both designs. Impact of design parameters of rubber mounts has been presented.

As noise levels within vehicle cabin plays very crucial part in purchasing commercial vehicles, reducing same through online Telematics data pattern analysis techniques during design and development phase is a key. The NVH validation technique with multichannel approach for capturing vibration and noise data at higher sampling frequency during design and validation differentiates from traditional manual approach. The framework uses online data collection at remote server and comparing same with decided rules, thresholds makes same easy for analysis. The hardware contains high speed processor, higher resolution ADC-Analog to Digital converter and multiple IOs for sensor integration. The system server has ability to collect in near real time with less latency and quite accurate at the noise making components like moving parts inside cabin.

NVH is very important topic in development of a vehicle. Legislative requirements for driver ear level, the comparison to competitor vehicles in terms of noise and vibration as well as sound quality set very challenging targets. High noise at Driver Ear Level (DEL) and tactile vibrations of tractor is the major cause of exhaustion to the operator. With growing competition there is need for the tractor manufacturers to control noise and vibration levels. Recognizing the corrective measures to reduce the noise and vibration has a greater impact in increasing the efficiency of the product and operator comfort. Objective of this paper is to control vehicle level noise and vibrations using vehicle level structure modifications. It includes airborne and structure borne NVH study on a tractor by measuring sound pressure and vibration levels at vehicle level. Single cylinder engine was mounted on light weight structure to meet the power and torque requirements in the tractor.

Connected vehicles has lot of applications coming up which involves Vehicle to Vehicle(V2V), to Infrastructure(V2I) communication techniques and many are getting deployed through frugal connectivity and security solutions. However, executing multiple customer centric, OEM centric and productivity services and applications needs lot of rigorous validation and bulk deployments. This needs lot of time, man efforts, and cost. Also quality of data collected from thousands of vehicles at every few seconds /minutes is matter of concern. There is a desperate need of telematics validation tools which can be customized as per OEM ad-hoc architecture. The suggested telematics smart testing and validation tool involves easy, configurable, and seamless options to test software updates in multiple variable nodes in connected onboard system architecture like telematics ECUs, multiple ECUs (EMS, ACM, IC, and Gateway ECU).

Cold spray (CS) is a rapidly developing solid-state repair and coating process, wherein metal deposition is produced without significant heating or melting of metal powder. Solid state bonding of powder particles is produced by impact of high-velocity powder particles on a substrate. In CS process, metal powder particles typically of Aluminum or Copper are suspended in light weight carrier gas medium. Here high pressure and high temperature carrier gas is expanded through a converging-diverging nozzle to generate supersonic gas velocity at nozzle exit. The CS process typically uses Helium as the carrier gas due to its low molecular weight, but Helium gas is quite expensive. This warrants a need to explore alternate carrier gases to make the CS repair process more economical. Researchers are exploring another viable option of using pure Nitrogen as a carrier gas due to its significant cost benefits over Helium.

There has been a radical shift in the way individuals commute. The growing interest in the comfort and luxury of private vehicles has resulted in severe traffic congestion, a major concern worldwide. India, a highly populous country, requires public transportation that can attract and provide seamless, affordable, fast, and secure commutes to its citizens while remaining sustainable and environmentally friendly. An analysis of the Indian Railway shows the need and demand for a high-speed transport system. High-speed rails have always garnered attention for their speed, technology, and communication capabilities. Hyperloop technology is one such endeavor that has piqued the world's interest. Hyperloop is a futuristic mode of transportation currently under development. It has a floating pod that races along inside giant low-pressure tubes, either above or below ground. The testing pod is capable of covering 400 m in 15 s under a preliminary experiment.

Thermal management of an electric vehicle plays a vital role for optimum performance and utilization of the available energy. Coolant circuits forms an important module in the overall vehicle architecture to achieve this. It is highly necessary to ensure that required quantity of the coolant is filled in the coolant loop. However, coolant deficit due to trapped air in the circuit might pose operational risks and system failure due to inadequate cooling. In this regard, CFD simulation approaches are proven to have an edge in visualizing the flow field, thereby, identifying the root cause of problem in coolant filling process. Using commercial CFD software Star-CCM+ as a tool, current work addressed the issue of removing trapped air inside the circuits by systematic filling approach. Studies have been carried out to understand the coolant filling fractions achieved with traditional filling method on battery loop.

Transportation has significant and long-lasting economic, social and environmental impacts which makes it an important dimension of urban sustainability. The World is witnessing rapid changes in modern traveling behavior, and efforts are continuously being made to stimulate sustainable mobility solutions with smart policies, new business models, and advanced technologies (connected cars, sensors, electrification). However, the shift is gradual in India when compared to developed countries due to unique barriers to emerging green mobility solutions. This paper empirically investigates public travel satisfaction and the primary factors for the selection of modes for different types of commutes. Quantitative data were collected including socio-demographic, travel mode choices, and preferred future mobility solutions from the western states of India.