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Authors : Thomas ANTOINE, Christophe THEVENARD, Pierrick BOTTA, Jerome DESTREE, Alain Le Quenven Future noise emission limits for passenger car are going to lower levels by 2024 (Third phase of R51-03, with a limit of 68dBA for the pass by noise) –Social cost of noise for France in 2021, shows clearly that the dominant source of noise pollution is indeed road traffic (81 Bn€ for a total of 146 Bn€) This R51 regulation is meant to lower the noise pollution from road traffic, however when looking closer to the sound source and their contributions, in particular the tire/road noise interaction, the environmental efficiency of this regulation is questionable. Indeed: Tire/Road interaction involves tires characteristics, that are constrained by an array of specification for energy efficiency, safety (wet grip, braking, etc…) and it has been proven that there is a physical limit to what could be expected from the tire as far as tire/road interaction noise is concerned.

Automotive suppliers provide multi-layer trims mainly made of porous materials. They have a real expertise on the characterization and the modeling of poro-elastic materials. A dozen parameters are used to characterize the acoustical and elastical behavior of such materials. The recent vibro-acoustic simulation tools enable to take into account this type of material but require the Biot parameters as input. Several characterization methods exist and the question of reproducibility and confidence in the parameters arises. A Round Robin test was conducted on three poro-elastic material with four laboratories. Compared to other Round Robin test on the characterization of acoustical and elastical parameters of porous material, this one is more specific since the four laboratories are familiar with automotive applications. Methods and results are compared and discussed in this work.

This paper touches on the mass transport phenomenon in the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) of a gasoline engine air path. It presents the control-oriented model and control design of the burned gas ratio (BGR) transport phenomenon, witnessed in the intake path of an internal combustion engine (ICE), due to the redirection of burned gases to the intake path by the low-pressure EGR (LP-EGR). Based on a nonlinear AMESim® model of the engine, the BGR in the intake manifold is modeled as a state-space (SS) output time-delay model, or alternatively as an ODE-PDE coupled system, that take into account the time delay between the moment at which the combusted gases leave the exhaust manifold and that at which they are readmitted in the intake manifold. In addition to their mass transport delay, the BGRs in the intake path are also subject to state and input inequality constraints.

Wind noise in automobile is becoming more and more important as the customer expectations increase. On the other hand, great progress has been made on engine and road noises, especially for electric and hybrid vehicles. Thus, the wind noise is now by far the major acoustic source during road and motorway driving. As for other noises, automobile manufacturers must be able, for a new car project, to specify, calculate and measure each step of the acoustic cascading: Source Transfers, both solid and air borne In the case of the automotive wind noise, the excitation source is the dynamic pressure on the vehicle’s panels. This part of the cascading is the one influenced by the exterior design. Even if many others components (panels, seals, cabin trims) have a big influence, the exterior design is a major issue for the wind noise. The wind noise level in the cabin may change significantly with only a small modification of the exterior design.

In order to design vehicles with diminished gCO2/km emissions level, car manufacturers aim at reducing the weight of their vehicles. One of the solutions advocated by the automotive industry consists in the replacement of metallic parts by lighter systems made of polymer reinforced composites. Unfortunately, the numerical simulations set to evaluate the vibratory and acoustic performances of systems made of this kind of materials are often not sufficiently effective and robust so that convincing test/simulation correlations are rarely met. Indeed, for polymer-based materials, numerous parameters affect the vibroacoustic behavior. On the one hand, it is well known that the viscoelastic properties (Storage -Young- and dissipative moduli) of polymers depend on the temperature, loading frequency and sometimes the humidity content.

Wind noise in automobile is becoming more and more important as customer requirements increase. On the other hand great progress has been made on engine and road noises. Thus, for many vehicles, wind noise is the major acoustic source during road and motorway driving. As for other noises, automobile manufacturers must be able for a new car project to specify, calculate and measure each step of the acoustic cascading: Source Transfers, both solid and air borne In the case of automotive wind noise, the excitation source is the dynamic pressure on the vehicle’s panels. This part of the cascading is the one influenced by the exterior design. Even if many others components (panels, seals, cabin trims) have a big influence, the exterior design is a major issue for the wind noise. The wind noise level in the cabin can sometimes change significantly with only a small modification of the exterior design.

Engine downsizing is potentially one of the most effective strategies being explored to improve fuel economy. A main problem of downsizing using a turbocharger is the small range of stable functioning of the turbocharger centrifugal compressor at high boost pressures, and hence the measurement of the performance maps of both compressor and turbine. Automotive manufacturers use mainly numerical simulations for internal combustion engines simulations, hence the need of an accurate extrapolation model to get a complete turbine performance map. These complete maps are then used for internal combustion engines calibration. Automotive manufacturers use commercial softwares to extrapolate the turbine narrow performance maps, both mass flow characteristics and the efficiency curve.

Due to its harmful effect on both human health and environment, soot emission is considered as one of the most important diesel engine pollutants. In the last decades, the industrial engine manufacturers have been able to strongly reduce its engine-out value by many different techniques, in order to respect the stricter emission norms. Simulation modeling has played and continues to play a key role for this purpose in the engine control system development. In this context, this paper proposes a new soot emission model for a direct injection diesel engine. This soot model is based on a zero-dimensional semi-physical approach coupled with a crank-angle resolved combustion model and a thermodynamic calculation of the burned gas products temperature. Furthermore, a multi linear regression model has been used to estimate the soot emissions as function of significant physical combustion parameters.

0D-1D codes allow researchers to obtain a prediction of the behavior of internal combustion engines with little computational effort. One of the submodels of such codes is devoted to the centrifugal compressor. This model is often based on the compressor performance maps, therefore requiring the extrapolation of the maps so that all possible operating conditions are covered. Particularly, a suitable extrapolation of isentropic efficiency map is sought. This work first examines different available methods for compressor efficiency extrapolation into off-design conditions. No method is found to provide satisfactory results at all extrapolated regions: low and high compressor speeds and low compression ratio at measured speeds. Hence, a new method is proposed and its accuracy is assessed with the aid of compressor off-design measurements.

This state of art investigation report explains the limitations of Rosin-Rammler approach in comparison with breakup approach. The injection phenomenon of a commercial injector is simulated at various injection pressures, with Heptane (C7H16) in a spray bomb. It is observed that Breakup approach is better suitable in terms of correlation for spray modelling than the Rosin-Rammler approach when the injection pressures are 10 and 20 MPa, the SMD correlation shows also a good correlation at these pressures. At 4 MPa, correlation is a bit poorer, which is coherent as break-up models are best suited to high injection pressures configurations. Also, in each approach the primary dependent parameters are fine-tuned and their effects are discussed.

Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) of fuels in the gasoline octane range has proven its potential to achieve simultaneous reduction in soot and NOX emissions, combined with high indicated efficiencies; while still retaining proper control over combustion phasing with the injection event, contrary to fully premixed strategies. However, gasoline fuels with high octane number as the commonly available for the public provide a challenge to ensure reliable ignition especially in the low load range, while fuel blends with lower octane numbers present problems for extending the ignition delay in the high load range and avoid the onset of knocking-like combustion. Thus, choosing an appropriate fuel and injection strategy is critical to solve these issues, assuring successful PPC operation in the full engine map.

Reducing NOx tailpipe emissions is one of the major challenges when developing automotive Diesel engines which must simultaneously face stricter emission norms and reduce their fuel consumption/CO2 emission. In fact, the engine control system has to manage at the same time the multiple advanced combustion technologies such as high EGR rates, new injection strategies, complex after-treatment devices and sophisticated turbocharging systems implemented in recent diesel engines. In order to limit both the cost and duration of engine control system development, a virtual engine simulator has been developed in the last few years. The platform of this simulator is based on a 0D/1D approach, chosen for its low computational time. The existing simulation tools lead to satisfactory results concerning the combustion phase as well as the air supply system. In this context, the current paper describes the development of a new NOx emission model which is coupled with the combustion model.

An innovative alternative to overcome the load limits of the early injection highly premixed combustion concept consists of taking advantage of the intrinsic characteristics of two-stroke engines, since they can attain the full load torque of a four-stroke engine as the addition of two medium load cycles, where the implementation of this combustion concept could be promising. In this frame, the main objective of this investigation focuses on evaluating the potential of the early injection HPC concept using a conventional diesel fuel combined with a two-stroke poppet valves engine architecture for pollutant control, while keeping a competitive engine efficiency. On a first stage, the HPC concept was implemented at low engine load, where the concept is expected to provide the best results, by advancing the start of injection towards the compression stroke and it was confirmed how it is possible to reduce NOX and soot emissions, but increasing HC and CO emissions.

In this study, different designs of intake ports for two-stroke Ultra Low Cost Gasoline Direct Injection Engine (ULC-GE) has been analyzed to conclude on best design using steady state analysis in STAR-CD. The four types of intake ports design with two cylinders, each having fourteen ports, have been studied. The basic differences in designs are horizontal inlet entry (perpendicular to cylinder axis) and vertical inlet entry (in-line with cylinder axis) having rotation of flow clockwise and anticlockwise. Each type is further differentiated in eight cases with varying distances between axis of two-cylinder as 85mm, 88mm, 91 mm, 94 mm, 97 mm, 100 mm, 105 mm and 112 mm. These designs are analyzed for four different pressure drops as 10 mbar, 50 mbar, 100 mbar and 150 mbar.

This paper proposes a method to detect an intake manifold leakage for a Diesel engine with a dual loop EGR system. The intake manifold leak has a strong impact on the engine performances by changing the intake manifold burned gas ratio. This fault is analyzed according to the control structure used and also according to the EGR operating mode. The paper proposes a diagnosis algorithm to detect the intake manifold leak in sequential or simultaneous use of the two EGR paths. The sensors considered are the mass air flow meter, the intake manifold pressure sensor, the exhaust equivalence ratio sensor and the differential pressure sensor (across the HP EGR valve). The diagnosis is based on a criteria that uses the redundancy between these sensors and air system models or estimators. The diagnosis threshold depends on the engine operating conditions as well as the sensor or model dispersions.

Lean NOx trap (LNT) and Selective Catalytic Reduction catalysts (SCR) are two leading candidates for diesel NOx after-treatment. Each technology exhibits good properties to reduce efficiently diesel NOx emissions in order to match the forthcoming EURO 6 standards. NOx reduction in LNT is made through a two-step process. In normal (lean) mode, diesel engine exhausts NOx is stored into the NOx trap; then when necessary the engine runs rich during limited time to treat the stored NOx. This operating mode has the benefit of using onboard fuel as NOx reducer. But NOx trap solution is restrained by limited active temperature windows. On the other hand, NH₃-SCR catalysts operate in a wider range of temperature and do not contain precious metals. However, NH₃-SCR systems traditionally use urea-water solution as reducing agent, requiring thus additional infrastructure to supply the vehicles with enough reducer. These pros and cons are quite restrictive in classical LNT or NH₃-SCR architecture.

For many years, bearing suppliers have been using the specific pressure to evaluate the fatigue risk of conrod bearings. However, modern engines have made the bearing more sensitive to various phenomena such as the thermal expansion or the elasticity of the conrod housing. These effects modify the stresses in the bearing layers and consequently fatigue risk. In this paper, we propose a new way to determine the bearing fatigue resistance. To achieve that, we analyze the elastic and plastic behavior of the bearing along the engine life. We detail and provide the analytical relationships which determine stresses in the overlay and in the substrate of the bearing in order to analyze their fatigue resistance. Various physical loads are taken into account such as the thermal load, the hydrodynamic pressure field, the fitting load, the free spread load. A good knowledge of the relationships between those physical phenomena helps to understand the mechanical behavior of the bearing.

This paper presents an after-treatment architecture combining a close coupled NOx trap and an under floor NOx trap. Instead of simply increasing the volume of the catalyst, we propose to broaden the active temperature window by splitting the LNT along the exhaust line. In order to design this architecture, a complete 1D model of NOx trap has been developed. Validated with respect to experimental data, this model has been useful to define the two volumes of LNT, making significant savings on the test bench exploitation. However, one of the main difficulties to operate the proposed architecture is the NOx purge and sulfur poisoning management. In order to optimize the NOx and sulfur purge launches, we have developed a control strategy based on an embedded reduced LNT model. These strategies have been validated on different driving cycles, by the means of simulation and of vehicle tests using rapid prototyping tools.

The introduction of alternative fuels is crucial to limit greenhouse gases. CNG is regarded as one of the most promising clean fuels given its worldwide availability, its low price and its intrinsic properties (high knocking resistance, low carbon content...). One way to optimize dedicated natural gas engines is to improve the CNG slow burning velocity compared to gasoline fuel and allow lean burn combustion mode. Besides optimization of the combustion chamber design, hydrogen addition to CNG is a promising solution to boost the combustion thanks to its fast burning rate, its wide flammability limits and its low quenching gap. This paper presents an investigation of different methane/hydrogen blends between 0% and 40 vol. % hydrogen ratio for three different combustion modes: stoichiometric, lean-burn and stoichiometric with EGR.

Fuel consumption in internal combustion engines and their associated CO2 emissions have become one of the major issues facing car manufacturers everyday for various reasons: the Kyoto protocol, the upcoming European regulation concerning CO2 emissions requiring emissions of less than 130g CO2/km before 2012, and customer demand. One of the most efficient solutions to reduce fuel consumption is to downsize the engine and increase its specific power and torque by using turbochargers. The engine and the turbocharger have to be chosen carefully and be finely tuned. It is essential to understand and characterise the turbocharger's behaviour precisely and on its whole operating range, especially at low engine speeds. The characteristics at low speed are not provided by manufacturers of turbochargers because compressor maps cannot be achieve on usual test bench.