Title: Powertrain control parameter optimisation using HIL simulations of a heavy-duty vehicle

Authors: Yuming Wang; Guoming Zhu; Fujun Zhang

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Vehicular Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, 5 South Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University, MI 48824, USA ' Department of Mechanical and Vehicular Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, 5 South Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China

Abstract: This paper studies the potential fuel economy improvement that can be achieved by optimising powertrain control parameters without modifying its hardware. A real-time powertrain model was developed and implemented in Simulink. It consists of a simple diesel engine model, an automatic transmission (AT) model with a torque converter, a vehicle dynamic model, and an integrated controller for both the engine and transmission. In particular, a dynamic gearshift clutch model was developed for the AT gearbox. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment was also established to simulate the developed real-time powertrain model, along with a simplified vehicle model under the federal test procedure (FTP), US06, and urban driving cycles. To evaluate the proposed control parameter optimisation process for a heavy-duty vehicle, the fuel consumptions of the FTP, US06, and urban driving cycles were used as the evaluation criterion, based upon different gear shifting control parameters and throttle slope angle. The HIL simulation results show that about 2% fuel economy can be gained by optimising the throttle slope angle; and simulation results also demonstrated that the optimised gearshift schedule provides the fuel economy improvement between 2.11% and 7.6% over the traditional gearshift schedule, where the most significant improvement was obtained for the urban driving cycle.

Keywords: heavy duty vehicles; automatic transmission; parameter optimisation; hardware-in-the-loop; powertrain control; HIL simulation; heavy vehicles; fuel economy; dynamic modelling; diesel engines; torque converter; vehicle dynamics; integrated control; gearshift clutch model; urban driving; fuel consumption; gear shifting control; throttle slope angle.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPT.2013.052662

International Journal of Powertrains, 2013 Vol.2 No.1, pp.1 - 25

Received: 24 Nov 2011
Accepted: 03 Aug 2012
Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

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