Shift control strategy and experimental validation for dry dual clutch transmissions

•The DCT gearshift processes have been analyzed by model simulation.•The clutch control strategies are proposed during the shift process respectively.•The throttle opening controller and clutch torque controllers have been designed.•The experiment on the prototype vehicle equipped with DCT has been conducted.•The effectiveness of control strategy is validated by simulation and experiment.

This paper focuses on the shift control strategy and the related experiments for dry dual clutch transmissions (DCT). The gearshift processes, upshifts and downshifts, have been analyzed by model simulation. The control strategies for both the torque phase and the inertia phase of both clutches are proposed during the shift process respectively. The throttle controller for engine torque and clutch torque controllers have been designed for both torque phase and inertia phase. The system model has been established on Matlab/Simulink platform. The simulation results show that the proposed control strategies satisfy the shifting requirement in terms of shift response and smoothness. Furthermore, the experiment on the prototype vehicle equipped with DCT has been conducted to analyze the shifting process with the control strategy proposed in this paper. The test data is highly agreeable to the simulation data and the effectiveness of shift control strategies is validated by the comparison between simulation results and the test data.