Pan-Ngum, Setha (2001) Alternative vehicle electronic architecture for individual wheel control. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Electronic control systems have become an integral part of the modern vehicle and
their installation rate is still on a sharp rise. Their application areas range from
powertrain, chassis and body control to entertainment. Each system is conventionally
control led by a centralised controller with hard-wired links to sensors and actuators. As
systems have become more complex, a rise in the number of system components and
amount of wiring harness has followed. This leads to serious problems on safety,
reliability and space limitation. Different networking and vehicle electronic architectures
have been developed by others to ease these problems. The thesis proposes an alternative
architecture namely Distributed Wheel Architecture, for its potential benefits in terms of
vehicle dynamics, safety and ease of functional addition. The architecture would have a
networked controller on each wheel to perform its dynamic control including braking,
suspension and steering.
The project involves conducting a preliminary study and comparing the proposed
architecture with four alternative existing or high potential architectures. The areas of
study are functionality, complexity, and reliability.
Existing ABS, active suspension and four wheel steering systems are evaluated in
this work by simulation of their operations using road test data. They are used as
exemplary systems, for modelling of the new electronic architecture together with the
four alternatives. A prediction technique is developed, based on the derivation of software
pseudo code from system specifications, to estimate the microcontroller specifications of
all the system ECUs. The estimate indicates the feasibility of implementing the
architectures using current microcontrollers. Message transfer on the Controller Area
Network (CAN) of each architecture is simulated to find its associated delays, and hence
the feasibility of installing CAN in the architectures. Architecture component costs are
estimated from the costs of wires, ECUs, sensors and actuators. The number of wires is
obtained from the wiring models derived from exemplary system data. ECU peripheral
component counts are estimated from their statistical plot against the number of ECU
pins of collected ECUs. Architecture component reliability is estimated based on two
established reliability handbooks.
The results suggest that all of the five architectures could be implemented using
present microcontrollers. In addition, critical data transfer via CAN is made within time
limits under current levels of message load, indicating the possibility of installing CAN in
these architectures. The proposed architecture is expected to· be costlier in terms of
components than the rest of the architectures, while it is among the leaders for wiring
weight saving. However, it is expected to suffer from a relatively higher probability of
system component failure.
The proposed architecture is found not economically viable at present, but shows
potential in reducing vehicle wire and weight problems.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Vehicles , Vehicles -- Models , Wheels , Electronics -- Research , Research, Industrial
Official Date:	August 2001
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Engineering
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Ball, R. J.
Sponsors:	Thailand
Extent:	[xiv], 265 leaves
Language:	eng

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