Investigation on the thermal problems of wet clutches for the tracked DCT vehicle during the launching process

Abstract

Abstract Tracked vehicles usually travel on unstructured roads, and the transmission system bears heavy impact load. As one of the most vulnerable parts, wet clutches slip to transfer the engine power. To investigate the thermal condition of these wearing components, a dynamic system is built firstly to describe the launching process of the tracked vehicle. After that, a thermal resistance model is established for the gearbox cooling system based on the lumped parameter method. Combing these two models, a coupled model is proposed for the tracked DCT vehicle. From the simulation results, under the condition of launching with one clutch, the temperature rise is 42°C; while, when two clutches involved, the temperature is 21°C and 14°C respectively, which means the mitigation of the thermal problem. In addition, compared with the condition of launching with one clutch, the shock load decreased from 2250 N·m to 1745 N·m and the launching time is reduced by 1.0s by launching with two clutches.