Oil Churning losses in Automatic Transmission

Sammanfattning: Lately the discussion on how big impact vehicles has on the environment has grown bigger and bigger. The vehicle manufacturers are building cars, trucks, and wheel loaders etc. that are getting more and more fuel efficient for every year. But where do the engineers at the companies make the improvements? The drive train is one area of the vehicle where many different sources of losses are found. The gearbox is one example, where the losses are both dependent and independent on the torque transferred by the gear pairs. The gearbox consists of several components that all of them contribute to the total system power loss. It is therefore of great interest to understand the magnitude of the losses in the gears, for different operating conditions, and also to be able to determine how they change with, for instance, rotational speed, oil viscosity. The goal of the master thesis was to make a study about the oil churning losses in a 6 speed automatic gearbox. This model makes use of calculations which were based on scientific experiments. This makes the loss calculations more advanced and accurate than the generalized formulas in most commercial software’s. This model takes into account only the oil churning and oil pocketing losses and shall not hold account for the windage losses or the other losses such as losses occurring due to bearings, seals, pumps etc. Due to time constraint a user friendly programme could not be written but the generated programme can be modified to make it easier for the user to input the data and produce results. All gears are modelled in simple modules built using MATLAB m-codes. Assumptions are made in the code when it came to choosing the oil viscosity.