On-road evaluation and regulatory recommendations for NOx and particle number emissions of China VI heavy-duty diesel trucks: A case study in Shenzhen.

This research analyzed the real-world NOx and particle number (PN) emissions of 21 China VI heavy-duty diesel trucks (HDDTs). On-road emission conformity was first evaluated with portable emission measurement system (PEMS). Only 76.19 %, 71.43 % and 61.90 % of the vehicles passed the NOx test, PN test and both tests, respectively. The impacts of vehicle features including exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) equipment, mileage and tractive tonnage were then assessed. Results demonstrated that EGR helped reducing NOx emission factors (EFs) while increased PN EFs. Larger mileages and tractive tonnages corresponded to higher NOx and PN EFs, respectively. In-depth analyses regarding the influences of operating conditions on emissions were conducted with both numerical comparisons and statistical tests. Results proved that HDDTs generated higher NOx EFs under low speeds or large vehicle specific powers (VSPs), and higher PN EFs under high speeds or small VSPs in general. In addition, unqualified vehicles generated significantly higher NOx EFs than qualified vehicles on freeways or under speed≥40 km/h, while significant higher PN EFs were generated on suburban roads, freeways or under operating modes with positive VSPs by unqualified vehicles. The reliability and accuracy of on-board diagnostic (OBD) NOx data were finally investigated. Results revealed that 43 % of the test vehicles did not report reliable OBD data. Correlation analyses between OBD NOx and PEMS measurements further demonstrated that the consistency of instantaneous concentrations were generally low. However, sliding window averaged concentrations show better correlations, e.g., the Pearson correlation coefficients on 20s-window averaged concentrations exceeded 0.85 for most vehicles. The research results provide valuable insights into emission regulation, e.g., focusing more on medium- to high-speed operations to identify unqualified vehicles, setting higher standards to improve the quality of OBD data, and adopting window averaged OBD NOx concentrations in evaluating vehicle emission performance.

Density Distillation for Fast Nonparametric Density Estimation.

Nonparametric density estimation has been extensively used in various application scenarios and theoretical models. However, the modeling of these powerful methods is inseparable from the sample data and comes at the cost of repeated and intensive kernel calculations, which makes their efficiency greatly affected by the sample scale, data dimension, and evaluation scale. Inspired by the knowledge distillation method, a student-teacher paradigm model named density convolutional neural network (DCNN) is proposed in this article. The method extracts the density knowledge of the samples based on the density convolution rule and transfers it to a compact and small deep neural network, in order to separate the sample data from the modeling and avoid the cumbersome kernel calculations. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method to various nonparametric estimation methods in terms of accuracy, stability, processing efficiency, and low-storage advantage. Especially, for the estimation speed, a univariate density estimation on 1.0E + 08 evaluation points using GPU only takes 1.57 s, and a 10-D multivariate density estimation on 1.0E + 08 evaluation points only takes 10.50 s, which makes our method very suitable for real-time and large-scale repetitive density estimation tasks.

Fatigue Life Prediction of Machined Specimens with the Consideration of Surface Roughness.

The fatigue strength and fatigue life of high-strength steels are greatly affected by their surface roughness. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms responsible for fatigue failure of the high-strength steel 42CrMo. Bending fatigue tests of stepped shafts with different levels of surface roughness were conducted to observe the fatigue live reduction affected by surface topography. Besides, the mechanical properties of 42CrMo and its strain-life relationship were established. Moreover, the analytical formulas to describe the stress concentration factor (SCF) and fatigue notch factor (FNF) induced by surface topography were introduced. To estimate the fatigue life of machined specimens with the consideration of surface roughness, the elastic portion of the total strain-life curve of the material was revised with the proposed analytical FNF imposed by surface topography. Comparisons between the estimated fatigue lives and experimentally obtained fatigue lives show that the effect of surface roughness on fatigue lives could be estimated effectively and conveniently by the proposed procedure.