Fuel Consumption Reduction on Heavy-Duty and Light-Duty Commercial Vehicles by Means of Advanced Central Tire Inflation Systems

Effect of tire slip losses on the energy demand and fuel consumption of a light-duty vehicle

“…As discussed in a previous work, 12 the TyPE software tool used to perform the fuel economy simulations presented in this paper is based on a simple kinematic approach and does not integrate a driver model. The calculation procedure implemented in TyPE involves the estimation of the tire rolling resistance and the total resistance opposing vehicle motion under the current conditions (vehicle mass, tire pressure, etc…), as schematically described in Figure 1 and discussed hereinafter.…”

“…The simulated driving cycles include homologation test procedures, such as the US FTP75, US06 , and HWFET cycles and the EU NEDC and WLTC cycles, as well as three custom driving cycles, defined in a previous project in collaboration with the vehicle OEM as representative of some typical mission of the real-world usage of the vehicle. 12…”

“…11 Then, the method was extended and integrated in a new software tool that can be used to estimate fuel consumption (namely TyPE , which stands for Tyre Pressure Effect ), which is able to instantaneously estimate the tire rolling resistance for the actual tire working conditions, taking into account the effects of tire inflation pressure, tire wear, the vertical load and the rolling time after the cold start of a tire. 12 However, another effect that implies energy losses from tires, which the Authors neglected in their previous works, has been mentioned in literature. This effect was first introduced by Sina et al, 13 who described the energy losses due to the longitudinal slip of traction wheels in the tire-road interaction and presented a methodology in which this estimation was included in the energetic balance of the vehicle.…”

“…central tire inflation systems, CTIS) generally show slow dynamics and a non-negligible energetic expense for the activation of the on-board pressure source, which makes a continuous regulation of tire pressure over a driving cycle, based on an instant-by-instant minimization of the energy losses, technically difficult and not advantageous from an energetic point of view. 12,15 Nonetheless, tire pressure systems could be used effectively to adapt the tire pressure to a certain level, which should be kept constant over the whole driving cycle.…”

A novel method to improve vehicle energy efficiency: Minimization of tire power loss

“…However, improving the vehicle efficiency through properly adjusting the inflation pressure is one of the main objectives of designing an active tire pressure system. 27,32 d’Ambrosio et al 35 studied the possible reduction can be achieved in fuel consumption of commercial vehicles. They also proposed a strategy to compensate the increased rolling resistance at the cold-start conditions by over-inflating the tires during the warm-up phase and notable reduction in fuel consumption was obtained.…”