Aerodynamic Design and Strength Analysis of the Wing for the Purpose of Assessing the Influence of the Bell-Shaped Lift Distribution

This article deals with aerodynamic and structural calculations of several wing designs to compare the influence of the shape on the lift distribution. Various shapes of wings for the required lift and bending moment were optimized to minimize drag and thereby reduce fuel consumption. One example was a wing with a bell-shaped lift distribution, which was proposed by Ludwig Prandtl and has been forgotten over the years. The first part of the paper focuses on minimization of the wing drag coefficient by a low fidelity method and the results are compared with the CFD calculation with good agreement. In the structural part of the analysis, the inner layout of the studied wings was designed. The structural design, containing elementary wing components and optimization loop, was carried out to minimize weight with respect to panel buckling. From these calculations the weights of wings were obtained and compared. In the last part of this study, an analysis of flight performance of an airplane with presented wings was performed for a selected flight mission. Results indicated that, for the free optimized wing, the fuel saving was about six percent.

VIABILITY OF USING ENGINE ROOM SIMULATORS FOR EVALUATION MACHINERY PERFORMANCE AND ENERGY MANAGEMENT ONBOARD SHIPS

The maritime institutions aim at contributing to reducing the adverse effects arising from the ships, machinery operation through the possibilities exit in the engine room simulators. The current paper explains the importance of engine room simulators in maritime education in general and focuses on their use in the field of evaluation and management of machinery within the engine room space. As a case study, an electric powered passenger ship and an oil tanker ship are investigated regarding applying ship energy management onboard. This investigation could be achieved using the possibilities available in TRANSIS ERS 5000. With reference to passenger ships, the results show the possibility of saving energy with a reduction of CO, SOx, CO2 and C emissions by about 7.97, 10.54, 12.36, and 20.11%, respectively. However, regarding tanker ships, the results reveal that a reduction of speed by 10% will achieve fuel saving by about 25%.

Development of control strategy for fast idling condition of diesel engine based on target torque

This article puts forward the concept of fast idling condition. The comparative experiments of idling and fast idling warming up engine show that: during cold start, the warm-up of fast idling condition whose maximum speed is 1350 r/min is the most fuel-efficient, fuel-saving about 4.5%, time-saving about 32.5%; at normal temperature, warming up engine of fast idling condition does not save fuel. The warm-up experiments of fast idling condition that accelerations are different in the descent phase show that when the engine is cold, the smaller the acceleration in the descent phase of fast idling condition is, the more time and fuel are saved; at normal temperature, the bigger the acceleration in the descent phase of fast idling condition is, the better the fuel economy is. Therefore, it is inferred that the engine should be warmed up under fast idling condition when the engine is cold and idling condition is used to warm up engine at normal temperature. To sum up, when the engine is cold, the engine should be warmed up under the fast idling condition whose maximum speed is 1350 r/min; at normal temperature, it should be warmed up in idling condition to save fuel.

Efficient Position Change Algorithms for Prolonging Driving Range of a Truck Platoon

Cooperative automated driving technology has emerged as a potential way to increase the efficiency of transportation systems and enhance traffic safety by allowing vehicles to exchange relevant information via wireless communication. Truck platooning utilizes this technology and achieves synchronized braking and acceleration, controlling two or more trucks simultaneously. This synchronized control makes driving with a very short inter-vehicle distance among trucks possible and reduces aerodynamic drag. This provides significant fuel consumption reduction, both in leading and trailing trucks, and achieves fuel-saving improvement. However, the static positioning sacrifices trucks in the front since they consume more fuel energy because of more air resistance than the rears. To solve this in-equivalent fuel consumption reduction benefit, this paper presents several heuristic algorithms to balance fuel consumption reduction and prolong the driving ranges by exploiting position changes among trucks in a platoon. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms try to reduce the number of position changes as much as possible to prevent any fuel waste caused by the unnecessary position change operations. In this manner, each truck in the platoon is likely to share a similar fuel consumption reduction with fewer position change counts, thus addressing the challenge of in-equivalent fuel savings distribution and obtaining optimal fuel efficiency. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can prolong the total distance by approximately 3% increased in two-truck platooning and even higher in six-trucks platooning of approximately 8%. Moreover, our proposed algorithms can decrease the position change count and ensure that trucks only switch to position arrangement once with no duplicate. Therefore, truck platooning obtains the maximum driving range with fewer position change counts, thus achieving efficient fuel saving.

An Overview of Eco-Driving Theory, Capability Evaluation, and Training Applications

Constrained by traditional fuel-saving technologies that have almost reached the limit of fuel-saving potential, the difficulty in changing urban congestion, and the low market penetration rate of new energy vehicles, in the short term, eco-driving seems to be an effective way to achieve energy-saving and emissions reduction in the transportation industry. This paper reviews the energy-saving theory and technology of eco-driving, eco-driving capability evaluation, and the practical application of eco-driving, and points out some limitations of previous studies. Specifically, the research on eco-driving theory mostly focuses on a single vehicle in a single scene, and there is a lack of eco-driving research for fleets or regions. In addition, the parameters used to evaluate eco-driving capabilities mainly focus on speed, acceleration, and fuel consumption, but external factors that are not related to the driver will affect these parameters, making the evaluation results unreasonable. Fortunately, vehicle big data and the Internet of Vehicles (V2I) provides an information basis for solving regional eco-driving, and it also provides a data basis for the study of data-driven methods for the fair evaluation of eco-driving. In general, the development of new technologies provides new ideas for solving some problems in the field of eco-driving.