Both active safety and fuel economy are important issues for vehicles. This paper focuses on a traction control strategy with an efficiency model in a distributed driving electric vehicle. In emergency situation, a sliding mode control algorithm was employed to achieve antislip control through keeping the wheels' slip ratios below 20%. For general longitudinal driving cases, an efficiency model...

INTRODUCTION VEHICLE engines have made remarkable progress since they first appeared and the operating range of engines in terms of rpm (revolutions per minute) and torque have expanded significantly. However, optimum engine design becomes difficult if the operation timing of the engine valves is fixed. For this reason, variable valve actuation has been used to optimize the valve timing in resp...

An energy management controller based on shortest path stochastic dynamic programming (SP-SDP) is implemented and tested in a prototype vehicle. The controller simultaneously optimizes fuel economy and powertrain activity, namely gear shifts and engine on-off events. Previous work reported on the controller’s design and its extensive simulation-based evaluation. This paper focuses on implementa...

Light-duty vehicles account for 43% of petroleum consumption and 23% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are the primary policy tool addressing petroleum consumption in the U.S., and are set to tighten substantially through 2025. In this dissertation, I address several interconnected questions on the technical, policy, and market asp...

This paper describes a strategy for fuel economy improvement of light duty truck with parallel hybrid system. The main objective of this paper is to develop a new hybrid controller which optimizes the torque distribution among various running situations and driver’s characteristics with on-line simulation, computing fuel and electric current consumption by using neural network models of the hyb...

Improvements in hybrid electric vehicle fuel economy with reduced emissions strongly depend on their supervisory control strategy. In order to develop an efficient real-time supervisory control strategy for a series hybrid electric bus, the proposed equivalent fuel consumption optimal control strategy is compared with two popular strategies, thermostat and power follower, using backward simulat...

The extent to which consumers value the expected future fuel savings from fuel economy improvements to new passenger cars and light trucks is a key determinant of the levels of fuel economy achieved in unregulated markets and the effects of regulatory standards on consumers’ surplus. This paper reviews 28 recent quantitative analyses of consumers’ willingness to pay for automotive fuel economy....

The influence of combustor size and shape on material feasibility is explored using (structural and fuel) weight, as well as fuel economy as metrics. Amaterials selection methodology developed for actively cooled rectangular panels has been embellished to include cylindrical/annular configurations. The procedure incorporates an analytical model for temperature and stress distributions subject t...

The University of Idaho has been developing gasoline direct injection two-stroke engine technology for use in snowmobile applications as part of the Clean Snowmobile Challenge organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Applying GDI to a twostroke engine significantly reduces emissions of unburned hydrocarbons and improves fuel economy by reducing or eliminating the short circuiting of fu...