Active Tire Pressure Control (ATPC) for Passenger Cars: Design, Performance, and Analysis of the Potential Fuel Economy Improvement

Active tire pressure control (ATPC) is an automatic central tire inflation system (CTIS), designed, prototyped, and tested at the Politecnico di Torino, which is aimed at improving the fuel consumption, safety, and drivability of passenger vehicles. The pneumatic layout of the system and the designed solution for on board integration are presented. The critical design choices are explained in detail and supported by experimental evidence. In particular, the results of experimental tests, including the characterizations of various pneumatic components in working conditions, have been exploited to obtain a design, which allows reliable performance of the system in a lightweight solution. The complete system has been tested to verify its dynamics, in terms of actuation time needed to obtain a desired pressure variation, starting from the current tire pressure, and to validate the design. The effect of the dynamics of the system has also been studied by simulating some system actuations under certain specific working conditions and by quantifying the effect of the actuation, in terms of the reduction that can be obtained on fuel consumption. Finally, on the basis of previous works on the effect of tire pressure on fuel consumption, and on the benefits that could be obtained by means of smart tire pressure management strategies, the potential fuel reduction provided by the studied technology has been estimated through computer simulations. According to the performed calculations, it has been found that the ATPC system could reduce fuel consumption by 1.7% on an annual basis with respect to a common underinflation case. This corresponds to a reduction of 18 million barrels of fuel and 6,700,000 metric tons of CO2 emitted per year in the United States alone.