Faster Locking Differential Through Active Brake-Control
When a vehicle with wheels aligned in pairs turn, the wheel traveling around the
outside of the curve has to roll farther than the wheel on the inside. This means
that some sort of device must must be used to allow the drive wheels to rotate
at different speeds to prevent wear on the tires. This is usually a mechanical device
where the input rotation controls the sum of the two output rotations, this
is known as a differential. This solution however has some shortcomings, the
biggest one is that the total amount of force that can be transferred between the
tires and the road surface is limited by the tire with the least traction. In slippery
conditions this can be a big problem since it only takes one wheel to lose traction
in order to prevent the vehicle from accelerating. In this thesis a locking differential
is used to overcome this shortcoming, this gives the driver the option to
lock the shafts of the driving wheels together. This is done by pushing two cogwheels,
one attached to each shaft, together. The aim of this thesis is to shorten
the lock- and unlock-time of the locking differential by aligning the cogwheels
using the service brakes and available sensors. The results were evaluated by
implementing the software in a truck and doing test runs on Scanias test track.
These tests showed that the system greatly improved both lock- and unlock-times
but at cost of lower driver comfort. With additional work with some fine tuning
of the system, the overall performance could probably be increased even more.
Joakim Hallqvist
2014
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Senast uppdaterad: 2021-11-10
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