AVL- PASSION AND RESULTS

AVL is the world's largest privately owned company for development, simulation and testing technology of powertrains (hybrid, combustion engines, transmission, electric drive, batteries and software) for passenger cars, trucks and large engines.

Thesis work – Automatic Transmission Power flow optimizer

Background

Future fuel consumption regulations in auto industry are very tough. In the past a lot of effort is done to improve engine efficiency, so to improve the engines further is very costly. Therefor the focus is moving towards driveline efficiency, and especially the transmission, to decrease the fuel consumption. Automatic transmission will still have a big market share in the future and the 2 biggest contributors to losses are oil pump and open clutches. This means that the layout and power flow has a big impact to the transmission efficiency. Since 2014 a number of Master Thesis work has been done to develop a “Powerflow Optimizer” at AVL has been performed which resulted in a MATLAB-code which creates all possible combinations of powerflows within the given requirements (no of planets and gears etc).

What

The purpose of the thesis is to continue the work on an optimizer of the AT power flow to minimize number of open clutches/brakes with following constrains:

1.  Number of gears

2.  Gear range (top gear divided with 1st gear ratio)

3.  Approximate gear ratio spread

4.  Number of, and type of planets

5.  Constrains specified during thesis work

How

·  Understanding and re-use of code from performed Master Thesis work on Power flow optimizer.

·  Analysis of existing Automatic Transmissions and type of planets

·  Understand how to calculate transmission gear ratios (speed, torque, power flow)

·  Continue the work on a “power flow optimizer” in MATLAB

·  Identify/define criterias to identify optimum solutions

When

Spring 2017

Tools

MATLAB

Candidates

Suitable candidates are M.Sc. students within mechanical engineering, vehicle engineering, or engineering with a good understanding of modeling, and an interest in powertrain development.
The thesis can be performed by 1-2 persons.

Contact

For more information please contact:

Per Rosander +46 (0) 701678260

Lars Bergkvist +46 (0) 812056823