Development of a Driving Cycle for Amman City with Performance Evaluation for Ice Vehicle

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. INTRODUCTION Vehicle performance in terms of emission and fuel consumption is commonly evaluated using representative driving cycles. A driving cycle defines when a vehicle is idling, accelerating, cruising, and decelerating in certain operating conditions [1]. Usually different cities and regions have different driving patterns. Thus, many worldwide driving cycles have been developed and adopted [2]. Examples of worldwide urban driving cycles for light vehicles are: New York City cycle (NYCC), Indian urban cycle (IUC), Japan 10 mode urban cycle (J10UC), France urban cycle (FUC), Europe dynamometer operating cycle (EDOC) and urban dynamometer driving schedule (UDDS). The parameters of these six driving cycles are listed in Table 1. There are significant differences between the presented driving cycles, in terms of speed, acceleration, deceleration, number of stops and duration as shown in Table 1. Thus, driving cycles obtained for certain cities or countries are not usually applicable to other cities or countries. Therefore, considerable research has been conducted to develop new driving cycles for different cities and regions. In [3] driving cycles for Chinese cities were developed and compared with European and American driving cycles. It was concluded that European or US emission factors could be significantly different from those of Chinese cities. In addition, a motorcycle driving cycle was developed in [4] for urban and rural routes in Edinburgh. It was found that the main specifications of the Edinburgh driving cycle are different from other standard driving cycles. The Hong Kong driving cycle was developed in [5] as well. The authors found that the Hong Kong driving cycle was different from some driving cycles (i.e., US 75, Perth cycle, and Melbourne peak cycle). A comprehensive analysis to develop a set of driving cycles that describes actual driving conditions in Europe was presented in [6]. Representative driving cycles are essential for designing and analyzing electrical and hybrid vehicles. In [7] the effect of driving patterns on configuration of hybrid vehicle battery system was studied. The effect of a real-world driving patterns on energy and power requirements of a converted plug-in hybrid electric two-wheeler was investigated in [8]. The effect of driving cycle fuel cell performance was investigated in [9] to predict the lifetime of the fuel cell.