Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reduce the drag loss and study the effects of operating conditions and groove parameters such as flow rate and temperature of automatic transmission fluid, clearance between plates, groove depth and groove ratio on the drag torque of a wet clutch for vehicles, parametric analysis of the drag torque model of wet multi-plate friction clutch with groove consideration. Design/methodology/approach: Both experimental and numerical research was carried out in this work. Parametric groove models, full film lubrication flow model and pressure distribution model are established to investigate the effects of the grooves on drag torque of a wet clutch. Multigrid method is used to simplify the solution. Findings: In this paper, a drag torque model of a wet multi-plate friction clutch based on the basic theory of viscous fluid dynamics is examined through experimental and numerical methods that take grooves into account, and the change trend of drag torque with operating conditions and groove parameters is analyzed. Originality/value: Multigrid method is used to solve the governing equations, which simplifies the solution process because of the restrictions and interpolation operations between the adjacent layers of coarser and fine grids. These works provide insight into the effect regularity of operating conditions and groove parameters on drag torque of a wet multi-plate friction clutch. Furthermore, variable test conditions and sufficient experimental data are the main functions in the experimental research.

Dual-motor Electric Drive Tracked Vehicles (DDTVs) have attracted increasing attention due to their high transmission efficiency and economical fuel consumption. A test bench for the development and validation of new DDTV technologies is necessary and urgent. How to load the vehicle on a DDTV test bench exactly the same as on a real road is a crucial issue when designing the bench. This paper proposes a novel dynamic load emulation method to address this problem. The method adopts dual dynamometers to simulate both the road load and the inertia load that are imposed on the dual independent drive systems. The vehicle’s total inertia equivalent to the drive wheels is calculated with separate consideration of vehicle body, tracks and road wheels to obtain a more accurate inertia load. A speed tracking control strategy with feedforward compensation is implemented to control the dual dynamometers, so as to make the real-time dynamic load emulation possible. Additionally, a MATLAB/Simulink model of the test bench is built based on a dynamics analysis of the platform. Experiments are finally carried out on this test bench under different test conditions. The outcomes show that the proposed load emulation method is effective, and has good robustness and adaptability to complex driving conditions. Besides, the accuracy of the established test bench model is also demonstrated by comparing the results obtained from the simulation model and experiments.

The load simulation test bench plays an important role in tracked vehicle development. The stability and accuracy of the system have a vital impact on the experimental results. To accurately reproduce the power performance of a tracked vehicle on the test platform, this paper aims to investigate the model, control, and calibration method of the test bench. Firstly, the dynamic model of a tracked vehicle under complex driving conditions is analyzed and established, which takes driving torque as the input and driving wheel speed as the output. Then, considering the uncertainties and disturbances in the system model, a 2-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) control method combined with a disturbance observer is proposed to solve the stability problem of the system. Furthermore, in order to investigate the accuracy of the simulation on the test bed, a method of calibrating the system by a flywheel set with standard inertia is proposed. In the calibration process, the influence of the system resistance torque and the original mechanical inertia on the results is considered, and the response time of the inertia simulation is analyzed in both a steady and dynamic state. Finally, the load simulation test is carried out with the corrected system. The test results show that the system has a high load simulation accuracy under various load simulation tests.