Fuel consumption has been a core consideration since the beginning of the transportation era. These are reasons related to our environment, and to economics. In the competitive truck industry fuel consumption is an important sales argument, since customers on an average drive their trucks for distances of 150 000 km per year, which means that fuel becomes a large part of the lifetime cost for a vehicle.
Existing braking system design in commercial vehicles are basically air assisted, which utilizes the compressed air from reservoir, which is being replenished based on requirement by a positive displacement compressor, generally driven directly by vehicle power pack.
In this paper, an effort has been made to partially use the energy stored in the springs (induced due to road undulations) for compressed air generation through a single acting positive displacement pump. The system design and its interface are done considering the actual measured data on a 16T Goods Vehicle at various road and road traffic conditions, namely, the in-city cycle, highway cycle and off-road cycle for both laden and un-laden applications.
The preliminary analysis of the data shows a positive indication of availability of simple harmonic displacements after re-sampling of data. The re-sampling has been done using macros developed in Microsoft Excel® and the system response is developed based on the order of re-sampling. It can be strongly inferred from the acquired data that this novel design has a potential to extract road energy and support conventional braking system of commercial vehicles.