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Accurate control of both the timing and quantity of injection events is critical for engine performance and emissions. The most serious problem which reduces the accuracy of the control operation in such systems is a time delay of the responsiveness for the opening and closing operation of the electromagnetic valve. Modern electronic control systems should be capable of driving high speed solenoid injectors at a very fast switch frequency with high efficiency and acceptable power requirements. In this paper, the dynamic characteristic of a high speed servo-hydraulic solenoid injector for diesel engine, with different driving circuits and control methods, is investigated. A pre-energizing control strategy based on a dual power supply is applied to speed up the opening response time of the injectors.

Advanced combustion engines dominate all automotive applications. Future high efficiency clean combustion engines can contribute significantly to sustainable transportation. Effective ignition strategies are studied to enable lean and diluted combustion under considerably high-density mixture and strong turbulences, for improving the efficiency and emissions of future combustion engines. Continuous discharge and multi-site ignition strategies have been proved to be effective to stabilize the combustion process under lean and EGR diluted conditions. Continuous discharge strategy uses a traditional sparkplug with a single spark gap and multiple ignition coil packs. The ignition coil packs operate under a specific time offset to realize a continuous discharge process with a prolonged discharge duration. Multi-site ignition strategy also uses multiple ignition coil packs.

To meet the request of China National 6b emission regulations which will be officially implemented in China, firstly including the RDE emission test limits, the transient emissions on real road condition are paid more attention. A non-plug-in hybrid light-duty gasoline vehicles (HEV) sold in the Chinese market was selected to study real road emissions employed fast response NOx analyzer from Cambustion Ltd. with a sampling frequency of 100Hz, which can measure the missing NO peaks by standard RDE gas analyzer now. Emissions from PEMS were also recorded and compared with the results from fast response NOx analyzer. The concentration of NOx emissions before and after the Three Way Catalyst (TWC) of the hybrid vehicle were also sampled and analyzed, and the working efficiency of the TWC in real road driving process was investigated.

With the increasing worldwide concern on environmental pollution, battery electrical vehicles (BEV) have attracted a lot attention. However, it still couldn’t satisfy the market requirements because of the low battery power density, high cost and long charging time. The range-extended electrical vehicle (REEV) got more attention because it could avoid the mileage anxiety of the BEVs with lower cost and potentially higher efficiency. When internal combustion engine (ICE) works as the power source of range extender (RE) for REEV, its NVH, emissions in starting process need to be optimized. In this paper, a 2-cylinder PFI gasoline engine and a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) are coaxially connected. Meanwhile, batteries and load systems were equipped. The RE co-control system was developed based on Compact RIO (Compact Reconfigurable IO), Labview and motor control unit (MCU).

For internal combustion engine systems, lean and diluted combustion is an important technology applied for fuel efficiency improvement. Because of the thermodynamic boundary conditions and the presence of in-cylinder flow, the development of a well-sustained flame kernel for lean combustion is a challenging task. Reliable spark discharge with the addition of enhanced delivered energy is thus needed at certain time durations to achieve successful combustion initiation of the lean air-fuel mixture. For a conventional transistor coil ignition system, only limited amount of energy is stored in the ignition coil. Therefore, both the energy of the spark discharge and the duration of the spark discharge are bounded. To break through the energy limit of the conventional transistor coil ignition system, in this work, an adaptive spark ignition system is introduced. The system has the ability to reconstruct the conductive ion channels whenever it is interrupted during the spark discharge.

The first firing cycle is very important for cold-start. Misfire of the first firing cycle can lead to significant HC emissions and affect the subsequent cycles. The first firing cycle for Gasoline SI engine have been reported in many studies. Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as an alternative fuel has been widely used in commercial vehicles during the last decade. However, the properties of the first firing cycle for LPG SI engine have been seldom reported. This paper presents an investigation of the characteristics of transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle during cold start on a LPG SI engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was applied to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle in the exhaust port of the engine. At the same time, the transient cylinder pressure and instantaneous crankshaft speed of the engine were measured and recorded.

A Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) Combustor enables the investigation of stabilization mechanisms in an environment that decouples the turbulent chemical kinetics from the complex recirculating flow. Previous studies on combustion of the low-pressure fuel jets in the Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) showed non-linear effect of coflow temperature on autoignition delay and the randomness of autoignition sites. In this work, a diesel spray is injected into the CATA with the injection pressure at 20MPa from a single-hole injector and the autoignition and combustion process of the spray is recorded by a high-speed camera video. The multipoint autoignition of diesel spray is observed in the CATA and the subsequent combustion process is analyzed. The results show that autoignition phenomenon plays an important role in the stabilization of the lifted flames of diesel spray under low coflow temperature.

In this paper, a case study of Shanghai HEVs application and its effects on the social and environmental benefits are presented based on the multi views on the different aspects, such as, not only for the fuel consumption saving, but also emissions reduction and health effect, agriculture loss and cleaning cost. The results show that the potential benefits for the society from HEVs application are markedly with the increase of the ratio of HEV in the population of vehicle. Based on this, the policy to promote the HEV purchased by consumers is very important at the beginning of HEV into market.

According to the requirements of two-wheel vehicle's future market and the characteristic of urban road conditions in China, the advantages and disadvantages of three basic configurations for the Hybrid Electric Vehicle are compared, finally, the serial hybrid configuration is chosen to be applied to hybrid Electric Moped solution. The selection principle of main components of this hybrid powertrain system includes ICE, generator, battery and hub motor, and the optimal match for performance parameters of these components are introduced in this paper. Then, a hybrid system model is established based on AVL-CRUISE. The simulations of fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions for both serial hybrid moped and conventional motorcycle is offered.

The transient characteristics of combustion and emissions during the engine start up at different higher cranking speeds for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications were presented in this paper. Cycle-by-cycle analysis was done for each start up case. Intake air mass during the first several cycles decrease as the engine was cranked at higher speed. Ignition timing is delayed with higher cranking speed, which leads to an increase of exhaust temperature. For various start up cases, similar quantity of fuel is injected at the first cycle, but the ignition timing is significantly delayed to meet the acceleration requirement when cranking speed enhanced. Because of the deterioration of intake charge, the air-fuel mixture is over-enriched in the first several cycles for the cases at higher cranking speed. With cranking speed is increased, the in-cylinder residual gas fraction rises, which leads to poor combustion and decrease of mass fraction of burned fuel.

Engine-off strategy are popular used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) for fuel saving. The engine of an HEV will start and stop frequently according to the road condition. In order to obtain excellent fuel economy and emissions performance, the fuel injection during engine quick start should be optimized. In this paper, the characteristic of mixture formation and the HC emissions at the first 5 cycles which contribute the most HCs were investigated. After the analysis of mixture preparation during start process, the HC emissions during engine quick start were optimized by means of cycle-by-cycle fuel injection control strategy. The fuel mixture concentration during start-up process fluctuates more dramatically under hot start condition. Typically, the mixture at 4th and 5th cycle is over-riched. Based on the original engine calibration, the fuel injection at the initial 5 cycles was optimized respectively.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) provide significantly improvement in fuel economy over conventional vehicles as well as reductions in greenhouse gas and petroleum. Numerous recent reports regarding control strategy, power train configuration, driving pattern, all electric range (AER) and their effects on fuel consumption and electric energy consumption of PHEVs are reported. Meanwhile, the control strategy for engine start-stop and mileage between recharging events from the electricity grid also has an important influence on the petroleum displacement potential of PHEVs, but few reports are published. In this paper, a detailed simulation model is set up for a plug-in series hybrid electric vehicle (PSHEV) employing the AVL CRUISE. The model was employed to predict the AER of the baseline PSHEV using rule-based logical threshold switching control strategy.

In this paper, based on the plug-in series hybrid electric vehicle development project, the vehicle technology solutions and the match of power system parameters were analyzed. The vehicle control strategies were identified and optimized according to plug-in hybrid vehicle features. The plug-in series hybrid, rule-based logic threshold switching control strategy, charge depleting (CD) mode and charge-sustaining (CS) mode are chosen according to the key factors, such as the environment, performance requirements, technical requirements and cost. And then the structure and model of vehicle control strategy were established to carry out vehicle energy management and power system control. The parameter selection, electric drive system matching, energy storage system design based on the requirement of vehicle performance, system architecture and control strategy are presented.

This paper presents an experimental study of the emission characteristics of a small Spark-Ignited, LPG engine. A single cylinder, four-stroke, water-cooled, 125cc SI engine for motorcycle is modified for using LPG fuel. The power output of LPG is above 95% power output of gasoline. The emission characteristics of LPG are compared with the gasoline. The test result shows that LPG for small SI engine will help to reduce the emission level of motorcycles. The HC and CO emission level can be reduced greatly, but NOx emissions are increased. The emission of motorcycle using LPG shows the potential to meet the more strict regulation.

An experimental study is presented on the evaporation of diluted droplet-laden two-phase jet flows within a heated air channel co-flow. In this study, n-heptane is pre-atomized by an ultrasonic nozzle to produce droplet cluster with a median diameter of about15μm, and a continuous cold air flow is applied to carry the fuel droplet cluster to emerge from a nozzle tube, producing a free turbulent jet of droplet stream. The droplet stream is then introduced as a central jet into a square-shaped channel with heated air co-flow for evaporation investigations. With flexibilities of the initial properties of droplet stream and surrounding conditions of channel flow, the axial evolution of droplet size is determined to characterize the evaporation behavior of n-heptane droplet stream under various boundary conditions. The equivalence ratios of droplet streams are varied by changing both the carrier-air flow rate and the fuel flow rate.

Research studies have suggested that changes to the ignition system are required to generate a more robust flame kernel in order to secure the ignition process for the future advanced high efficiency spark-ignition (SI) engines. In a typical inductive ignition system, the spark discharge is initiated by a transient high-power electrical breakdown and sustained by a relatively low-power glow process. The electrical breakdown is characterized as a capacitive discharge process with a small quantity of energy coming mainly from the gap parasitic capacitor. Enhancement of the breakdown is a potential avenue effectively for extending the lean limit of SI engine. In this work, the effect of high-power capacitive spark discharge on the early flame kernel growth of premixed methane-air mixtures is investigated through electrical probing and optical diagnosis.

Idle stopping is one of the most important fuel saving methods for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). While the enriched injection strategy which was employed to ensure reliable ignition of first cycle will leads to even more fuel film stayed in the intake port, all of the liquid film will evaporate randomly and interfere the mixture air-fuel ratio of the followed cycles. The fuel transport of the first cycle should be enhanced to reduce the residual fuel film, and then the control of the cycle-by-cycle air-fuel ratio will become easier and the combustion and HC emissions will also be better. In this paper the mixture preparation characteristics of the unfired first cycle, as well as the combustion and HC emissions characteristics of the fired first cycle under various injection timing strategies such as close-valve injection, mid-valve injection, and open-valve injection were investigated.

To improve the cold start performance and to reduce the misfire occurrence at cold start, the start-up strategy of total stoichiometric ratio combined with local rich mixture was applied in the study. The effect of injection strategy (the 1st injection timing, 2nd injection timing, 1st and 2nd fuel injection proportion and ignition timing) on the cold start HC emissions in the initial 10 cycles were investigated in a Two stage direct injection (TSDI) gasoline engine. The transient HC and NO emissions in the initial 10 cycles were analyzed, when the fuels are injected in the only 1st cycle and in the followed all cycles. The transient misfiring HC emissions were compared between the single and two-stage injection modes. In addition, the unburned HC (UBHC) emissions in the 1st cycle are compared among the TSDI engine, Gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine, Port fuel injection (PFI) engine and Liquefied petroleum gaseous (LPG) engine at the stoichiometric ratio.

A specially designed generator has been developed to produce poly-disperse droplet streams: A liquid fuel (n-heptane) is metered to an ultrasonic atomizer to produce droplets, which are then carried and accelerated vertically upwards through a nozzle tube by carrier-air flow. Conditions of the streams at the nozzle exit are modulated by varying the length of nozzle tubes, the fuel and carrier-air flow rate. Optical measurement techniques such as direct photography method, schlieren photography and particle image velocimetry (PIV) are employed to characterize its performance characteristics. Effects of the nozzle tube length, the carrier-air and fuel flow rate are investigated to evaluate the performance of the generator. Longer nozzle tubes provide a better flow guidance for the carrier-air, and tend to generate streams with less and smaller droplets due to the transporting losses.

Ion current sensing, which usually employs a spark plug as its sensor to obtain feedback signal from different types of combustion in SI engines, may be applied to HCCI combustion sensing instead of a prohibitively expensive piezoelectric pressure transducer. However, studies showed that the ion current detected by a spark plug sensor is a localized signal within the vicinity of the sensor's electrode gap, being affected by conditions around it. To find out better and feasible ion probe positions, a 3D-CFD model with a detailed surrogate mechanism containing 1423 species and 6106 reactions was employed to study the effect of stratification on ion distribution in HCCI combustion. The simulation results indicate that the monitor probe 1, 8 and 9 are more stable and reliable than the others. IONmax and dIONmax are more accurate to estimate CA50 and dQmax respectively.