Tyre Pressure Model For Predictingfuel Consumptionof Vehicles On Ghana Roads

摘要

Abstract: In the world today, due to the high cost of running a vehicle, there has been many researches to find ways of minimizing running cost. Components of the running cost come from the tyre, fuel, spare parts of vehicles and also ensuring safety of the vehicle. This paper presents the effect the tyre pressures of vehicles on fuel consumption and ways to optimize running cost due to tyre pressure. In this study, the tyre pressures were measured for different types of vehicles at two public institution campuses (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and Kumasi Polytechnic) and three public transport stations (Asafo, Roman Hill and Kejetia) in Kumasi Metropolis to ascertain how tyre pressures of these vehicles have deviated from the recommended tyre pressures stated by the manufacturers. Also the fuel consumption was measured to develop a model between the fuel consumption and the tyre pressure which was used to predict the amount of fuel consumption by a vehicle on Ghana roads. It is concluded that, 73% of the data collected for the different vehicles fall within the predicted results obtained from the developed model and 13% fall within the experimental error; hence the developed model can be used to predict the amount of fuel consumed by vehicles. It was found out thatabout 97% of vehicles surveyed in Kumasi Metropolis had their tyre pressures deviated from the recommended tyre pressuresthereby,increasing the fuel consumption of the vehicle.