Archive of Mechanical Engineering

The paper describes the design and multibody dynamic analysis of a mechanically interconnected suspension, as applied to a small off-road vehicle. Interconnected suspensions use some sort of connection between the axles of a vehicle in order improve ride quality or vehicle handling. In principle, the connection may be hydraulic, pneumatic, or mechanical, but for installation in a typical passenger car, a mechanical connection would likely be impractical due to weight and complexity. In this paper, the vehicle in question is the University of Windsor SAE Baja off-road competition vehicle, and novel mechanical design is proposed. A multibody dynamic analysis is performed on the proposed design using the EoM open source multibody software developed by theUniversity ofWindsorVehicle Dynamics and Control research group in order to assess any potential performance improvements.

This article investigates unstable tiltrotor in hover system identification from flight test data. The aircraft dynamicswas described by a linear model defined in Body-Fixed-Coordinate System. Output Error Method was selected in order to obtain stability and control derivatives in lateral motion. For estimating model parameters both time and frequency domain formulations were applied. To improve the system identification performed in the time domain, a stabilization matrix was included for evaluating the states. In the end, estimates obtained from various Output Error Method formulations were compared in terms of parameters accuracy and time histories. Evaluations were performed in MATLAB R2009b environment.

The article presents the analyses of the flights carried out the by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) named PW-ZOOM used to perform a photogrammetric mission and monitoring of fauna in Antarctic areas. The analyses focus on the deviations of the optical axis of the photo-camera which occurred during photogrammetric flights carried out on the same route but during several Antarctic expeditions performed in subsequent years (2014 and 2015). The results were subjected to correlation tests with weather conditions (wind speed and variability). The basis for these analyses are the data from the onboard signal recorder integrated with an autopilot.

The accuracy of the Moment Method for imposing no-slip boundary conditions in the lattice Boltzmann algorithm is investigated numerically using lid-driven cavity flow. Boundary conditions are imposed directly upon the hydrodynamic moments of the lattice Boltzmann equations, rather than the distribution functions, to ensure the constraints are satisfied precisely at grid points. Both single and multiple relaxation time models are applied. The results are in excellent agreement with data obtained from state-of-the-art numerical methods and are shown to converge with second order accuracy in grid spacing.

The presented paper concerns CFD optimization of the straight-through labyrinth seal with a smooth land. The aim of the process was to reduce the leakage flow through a labyrinth seal with two fins. Due to the complexity of the problem and for the sake of the computation time, a decision was made to modify the standard evolutionary optimization algorithm by adding an approach based on a metamodel. Five basic geometrical parameters of the labyrinth seal were taken into account: the angles of the seal’s two fins, and the fin width, height and pitch. Other parameters were constrained, including the clearance over the fins. The CFD calculations were carried out using the ANSYS-CFX commercial code. The in-house optimization algorithm was prepared in the Matlab environment. The presented metamodel was built using a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network which was trained using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The Neural Network training and validation were carried out based on the data from the CFD analysis performed for different geometrical configurations of the labyrinth seal. The initial response surface was built based on the design of the experiment (DOE). The novelty of the proposed methodology is the steady improvement in the response surface goodness of fit. The accuracy of the response surface is increased by CFD calculations of the labyrinth seal additional geometrical configurations. These configurations are created based on the evolutionary algorithm operators such as selection, crossover and mutation. The created metamodel makes it possible to run a fast optimization process using a previously prepared response surface. The metamodel solution is validated against CFD calculations. It then complements the next generation of the evolutionary algorithm.

In the article, the authors analyze and discuss several models used to the calculation of air gauge characteristics. The model based on the actual mass flow (which is smaller than the theoretical one) was proposed, too. Calculations have been performed with a dedicated software with the second critical parameters included. The air gauge static characteristics calculated with 6 different models were compared with the experimental data. It appeared that the second critical parameters model (SCP) provided the characteristics close to the experimental ones, with an error of ca. 3% within the air gauge measuring range.

This article reports the effects of CuO/water based coolant on specific fuel consumption and exhaust emissions of four stroke single cylinder diesel engine. The CuO nanoparticles of 27 nm were used to prepare the nanofluid-based engine coolant. Three different volume concentrations (i.e 0.05%, 0.1%, and 0.2%) of CuO/water nanofluids were prepared by using two-step method. The purpose of this study is to investigate the exhaust emissions (NOx), exhaust gas temperature and specific fuel consumption under different load conditions with CuO/water nanofluid. After a series of experiments, it was observed that the CuO/water nanofluids, even at low volume concentrations, have a significant influence on exhaust emissions. The experimental results revealed that, at full load condition, the specific fuel consumption was reduced by 8.6%, 15.1% and 21.1% for the addition of 0.05%, 0.1% and 0.2% CuO nanoparticles with water, respectively. Also, the emission tests were concluded that 881 ppm, 853 ppm and 833 ppm of NOx emissions were observed at high load with 0.05%, 0.1% and 0.2% volume concentrations of CuO/water nanofluids, respectively.

Discontinuous coefficients in the Poisson equation lead to the weak discontinuity in the solution, e.g. the gradient in the field quantity exhibits a rapid change across an interface. In the real world, discontinuities are frequently found (cracks, material interfaces, voids, phase-change phenomena) and their mathematical model can be represented by Poisson type equation. In this study, the extended finite element method (XFEM) is used to solve the formulated discontinuous problem. The XFEM solution introduce the discontinuity through nodal enrichment function, and controls it by additional degrees of freedom. This allows one to make the finite element mesh independent of discontinuity location. The quality of the solution depends mainly on the assumed enrichment basis functions. In the paper, a new set of enrichments are proposed in the solution of the Poisson equation with discontinuous coefficients. The global and local error estimates are used in order to assess the quality of the solution. The stability of the solution is investigated using the condition number of the stiffness matrix. The solutions obtained with standard and new enrichment functions are compared and discussed.