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Waste Heat Recovery is one of the major opportunities to increase the engine efficiency in internal combustion engines (ICE) for the transportation sector and to meet the emissions targets. ORC-based units are widely investigated, in particular for heavy duty vehicles and light commercial ones. However, when a typical operation of the ICE on a vehicle is considered, working temperature and exhaust flow rates are not always suitable for recovery, being characterized by low-grade enthalpy. Volumetric expanders are among the most suitable technological solutions for small scale ORC-based power units, but they can suffer of low efficiency in real operation. A way to improve its performances is represented by a supercharging technique, which involves a further intake port.

Among the different opportunities to save fuel and reduce CO2 emissions from internal combustion engines, great attention has been done on the waste heat recovery: the energy wasted is, in fact, almost two thirds of the energy input and even a partial recovery into mechanical energy is promising. Usually, thermal energy recovery has been referred to a direct heat recovery (furtherly expanding the gases expelled by the engine thanks to their high pressure and temperature) or an indirect one (using the thermal energy of the exhaust gases - or of any other thermal streams - as upper source of a conversion power unit, which favors a thermodynamic cycle of a suitable working organic fluid).

The use of reciprocating internal combustion engines (ICE) dominates the sector of the on-road transportation, both for passengers and freight. CO2 reduction is the present technological driver, considering the major worldwide greenhouse reduction targets committed by most governments in the western world. In the near future (2020) these targets will require a significant reduction with respect to today’s goals, reinforcing the importance of reducing fuel consumption. In ICEs more than one third of the fuel energy used is rejected into the environment as thermal waste through exhaust gases. Therefore, a greater fuel economy could be achieved if this energy is recovered and converted into useful mechanical or electrical power on board. For long haul vehicles, which run for hundreds of thousands of miles per year at relatively steady conditions, this recovery appears especially worthy of attention.

Internal combustion engines are actually one of the most important source of pollutants and greenhouse gases emissions. In particular, on-the-road transportation sector has taken the environmental challenge of reducing greenhouse gases emissions and worldwide governments set up regulations in order to limit them and fuel consumption from vehicles. Among the several technologies under development, an ORC unit bottomed exhaust gas seems to be very promising, but it still has several complications when it is applied on board of a vehicle (weight, encumbrances, backpressure effect on the engine, safety, reliability). In this paper, a comprehensive mathematical model of an ORC unit bottomed a heavy duty engine, used for commercial vehicle, has been developed.

Fuel cells are widely accepted to be the alternative powertrain with the highest potential to compete with the internal combustion engine for a mean-long future sustainable prospective for passenger mobility: Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) seem to be the most promising technology. Anyway, the final goal is still far to be reached, since often the great potential advantages connected with fuel cells are not completely obtained, due to the difficulties encountered in component design and optimization. Moreover, H2 availability still appears to be one of the most important limitations. Taking the lead by these considerations the authors derived a physically consistent integrated mathematical model of a PEM propulsion system: the model is fully modular and is aimed both to gain a deeper insight of the complex chemical and thermo-fluid-dynamical processes involved, and to the development of control strategies for the propulsion system and all its auxiliaries.

In modern turbocharged internal combustion engines the cooling of the air after the compression stage is the standard technique to reduce temperature of the engine intake air aimed at improving cylinder filling (volumetric efficiency) and, therefore, overall global efficiency. At present, standard values for the intake air temperature are in the range 30-70°C, dependently on engine load, external air conditions and vehicle speed and the adoption of a dedicated cooling fluid operating at low temperatures (-10-0°C) is addressed as the most viable option to achieve an effective temperature reduction. This paper investigates a pilot engine set-up, featuring an evaporator on the intake line of a turbocharged diesel engine, tested on a high speed dynamometer bench: the evaporator was a part of an air refrigeration unit – the same used for cabin cooling - composed also by a compressor, a condenser and a thermostatic expansion valve.

The growing interest on environmental issues related to vehicles is pushing up the research on reciprocating internal combustion engines which seems to be endless and able to insure to combustion engines a long future. Euro standards imposed a significant reduction of pollutant emissions and were the stimulus to favor the conception of technologies which represented real breakthroughs; the recent directives on greenhouse gases emissions further reinforced the concept of reducing fuel consumption and, consequently, carbon dioxide emissions. So, new technological efforts have to be made on internal combustion engines in order to achieve this additional target: several technological options are already available or under studying, but only a few of these are suitable, in particular, in terms of costs attendance per unit of CO2 saved. Among these technologies, a revision of engine cooling system seems to have good potentiality.

The paper describes the derivation of a real-time controller for the energy management of a series hybrid city bus. The controller is based on Optimal Control theory and on a control-oriented model of the propulsion system. The model is of the quasi-stationary, backward type, and it is derived from tabulated data of the single components provided by the manufacturers and basic, first-principle equations. The fuel consumption obtained with the optimal controller is compared with that yielded by a conventional controller tracking the battery state-of-charge.

One of the most promising near-future alternatives to traditional gasoline and Diesel Internal Combustion Engines is the utilization of alternative fuels. Among these, Liquefied Petroleum Gases (LPG) play a key role for its wide availability and high energetic density. The adoption of liquid phase injection systems would permit the highest achievable performances from both a traditional (power output, acceleration, …) and an environmental (pollutants and greenhouse emissions) point of view. Those systems, however, still present many unsolved problems, substantially limiting their use. The authors here report the results of an intense research activity aimed to the realization of a model-based A/F controller to be used on-board for liquid-phase LPG injected engines. All the main dynamical phenomena involved were modeled: it was so possible to analyze in detail the efficiency of the system in terms of A/F control (strictly related to pollutant emissions) and power output of the engine.

Literature showed quite clearly that the efficiency of Air to Fuel Ratio (AFR) control for Spark Ignition (SI) Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) strongly depends on its capacity to deal with the fuel-flow phenomena inside intake manifolds. Moreover, engine performances (such as power output, specific fuel consumption, and exhaust gas emissions) are directly related to the efficiency of the combustion process, which, on its turn, can be affected substantially by the air/fuel ratio variations related to the fuel-film dynamics. In this work a comprehensive model-based air/fuel ratio control technique is proposed: this is based on a dynamical model of the air dynamics inside inlet manifolds and on the online identification of the fuel-film parameters. Here the identification procedure is illustrated in detail and validated basing on experimental data regarding a single-cylinder engine.

Many advantages are related to the use of LPG as fuel in SI injected ICE. Most of them regard the lower environmental impact with respect to gasoline. The liquid-phase injection is one of the most important aspects of these engines, being able to guarantee the maintenance (and even an increase) of the more traditional engine performances (power, acceleration, driveability, etc) and to match the 3-way catalytic converter A/F specifications. In this paper the transient phenomena occurring in an LPG injection system have been studied, focusing the attention on the problems related to A/F and liquid-phase control.

Energy recovery in reciprocating internal combustion engines (ICE) is one of the most investigated options for the reduction of fuel consumption and GHG emissions saving in the transportation sector. In fact, the energy wasted in ICE is greater than that converted in mechanical form. The contribution associated with the exhaust gases is almost one third of the fuel energy, calling for an urgent need to be recovered into mechanical form. An extensive literature is oriented toward this opportunity, strongly oriented to ORC (Organic Rankine Cycle)-based power units. From a thermodynamic point of view, one option, not extensively explored, is certainly represented by the Inverted Brayton Cycle (IBC) concept and by the corresponding components which make possible this recovery.

In the perspective of fuel saving and emissions reduction, engine oil thermal management has not yet received the attention it deserves. Lubricating oil, in fact, should be the focus of a specific warmup action: the expected benefits is on friction reduction – mechanical efficiency improvement – but also on a positive interaction with the cooling fluid thermal dynamics. The lower thermal capacity of the circulating oil (with respect to the cooling fluid) and the instantaneous reduction of the viscosity due to temperature increase produces a faster engine overall efficiency benefit: this invites to focus specific actions on its thermal management in the direction of speeding up the temperature rise during a cold engine starting.

The dynamic performances of the cooling circuit have a great impact on ICE efficiency and CO2 emissions. Engine thermal management is among the most promising technologies able to offer a sensible reduction in terms of engine fuel consumption and CO2 emission. These aspects are widely treated in literature and many technologies are already on the market or ready to be used. A reduced attention in literature, has been done on the pump performances during the real operating conditions. Homologation cycles try to reproduce these conditions. In light duty vehicles these cycles consist in accelerating and decelerating the engine following a specified velocity-time sequence. According to this procedure, the propulsion power requested by the vehicle is low, and the power absorbed by the auxiliaries became significant. The pump of the cooling fluid is the most important component among the auxiliaries.

The use of reciprocating internal combustion engines (ICE) dominates the sector of the in-the-road transportation sector, both for light and heavy duties. CO2 reduction is the technological driver, considering the severe worldwide greenhouse commitments. In ICE more than one third of the fuel energy used is rejected to the environment as thermal waste through the exhaust gases. Therefore, a greater fuel economy could be achieved, recovering this energy and converting it into useful electric power on board. Financial benefits will be produced in terms of fuel cost which will rebound similar benefits in terms of CO2 emitted. For long hauling vehicles, which run for thousands of miles, frequently at fixed engine operating conditions, this recovery appears very worthy of attention. In this activity, an ORC-based power unit was designed, built and tested fed by a heavy duty diesel engine, so contributing to the huge efforts on going in that specific sector.

Alternative vehicle powertrains (hybrid, hydrogen, electric) are among the most interesting solutions for environmental problems afflicting urban areas. Electric and hybrid vehicles are now slowly taking place in the automotive sector, but on a Tank To Wheels (TTW) basis, the most effective alternative powertrain is surely represented by Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV): those fuelled by hydrogen seem to be the ones closest to market. The design of a FCEV however, is not straightforward and involves several issues (fuel cell sizing, hydrogen storage, components efficiency, sizes and weights). Basing on these considerations, the Authors present a software procedure for the optimal design of the components of a passenger FCHEV (Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle).

A smart way to reduce CO2 emission in transportation sector is to recover energy usually wasted and re-use it for engine and vehicle needs. ORC plant on exhaust gas of ICE is really interesting, but it has a significant impact on the exhaust line and vehicle's weight. The backpressure realized in the exhaust and the weight gain, in fact, produce a specific fuel consumption increase as well as an increase in the propulsion power: both terms could vanish the energy recovered. The paper discusses the effects of the pressure losses produced by an ORC plant mounted on the exhaust line of an IVECO F1C test bench engine. The interactions produced on the turbocharged engine have been experimentally investigated: the presence of an IGV turbocharger makes the effect of the backpressure not straightforward to be predicted and needed a full experimental testing of the group in order to understand its reaction and the net effect in terms of specific fuel consumption.

Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) is one of the most viable opportunities to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from internal combustion engines in the transportation sector. Hybrid thermal and electrical propulsion systems appear particularly interesting because of the presence of an electric battery that simplifies the management of the electrical energy produced by the recovery system. The different technologies proposed for WHR can be categorized into direct and indirect ones, if the working fluid operating inside the recovery system is the exhaust gas itself or a different one whose sequence of transformations follows a thermodynamic cycle. In this paper, a turbocharged diesel engine (F1C Iveco) equipped with a Variable Geometry Turbine (VGT) has been tested to assess the energy recoverable from the exhaust gases both for direct and indirect recovery.

Fuel consumption reduction and CO2 emissions saving are the present drivers of the technological innovation in Internal Combustion Engines for the transportation sector. Among the numerous technologies which ensure such benefits, the role of the cooling pump has been recognized, mainly referred to the possibility to improve engine performances during warm up. During engine homologation, an additional benefit on the fuel consumption can be also reached reducing the energy demand of the pump. In fact, during the cycle, propulsion power requested by the vehicle is low and the importance of the energy absorbed by the pump became significant, since the pump operates far from its maximum efficiency.

The need for even more efficient internal combustion engines in the road transportation sector is a mandatory step to reduce the related CO2 emissions. In fact, this sector impacts significantly on greenhouse gases worldwide, and the path toward hybrid and electric powertrains has just begun. In particular, in heavy-duty vehicles the full electrification of the powertrain is far to be considered as a really feasible alternative. So, internal combustion engines will still play a significant role in the near/medium future. Hence, technologies having a low cost to benefits (CO2 reduction) ratio will be favorably introduced in existing engines. Thermal management of engines is today a recognized area of research. Inside this area, the interest toward the lubricant oil has a great potential but not yet fully exploited. Engine oil is responsible of the mechanical efficiency of the engine which has a significant potential of improvement.