A robust method for collecting and processing the on-road instantaneous data of fuel consumption and speed for...

Using the laboratory-based fuel consumption models for predicting real-world fuel consumption requires the measurement of data under certain conditions to obtain high accuracy of predicted result. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a logging device for measuring the real-time fuel consumption and speed of vehicle on the road. This article presents a study on developing the on-board data logging device to collect real-world data of fuel consumption and speed for motorcycles with the update rate of 1 Hz. The instantaneous speed of the motorcycle was determined based on the rotational speed of the wheel and the wheel radius. Another module was used to determine the instantaneous fuel consumption rate (FR) though measuring the duration injection pulse. The relationship between the duration injection pulse and the injected amount of fuel was established with high correlation coefficient of 0.997. In addition, a filter was designed to remove noise in the dataset collected using the data logging device. The random errors in the speed and the FR profiles were detected and replaced, the percentage of these errors is 1.8% and 2.4%, respectively. The developed method is a precise one for transient fuel consumption and speed measurement. In chassis dynamometer test, the average deviation between steady speed measured by the chassis and the data logging device is only approximately 0.35%. At transient state, the biggest deviation between these two datasets is less than 3.5%. The average FR at steady speed measured by the developed method is slightly different from the one measured by the carbon balance method. The difference is 0.9%, 2.5%, and 0.25% at the speeds of 30 km/h, 50 km/h, and 70 km/h, respectively. Following the transient test cycle, the fuel consumption measured by the developed method is 4.35% lower than that determined by the carbon balance method. Implications: A robust method for collecting and processing the on-road instantaneous data of fuel consumption and speed was developed for motorcycles. The proposed method can record well the real-world driving data for motorcycles, including the fuel consumption and speed, with the update rate of 1 Hz. The filter was designed to minimize noise while maintaining data integrity of the collected dataset, the percentage of errors in the the speed and the FR profiles is 1.8% and 2.4%, respectively. The proposed method, therefore, can be used as effective tools for future studies relating to the fuel consumption and emission of motorcycles on the road.