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The electrification of powertrains provides a critical opportunity to change the way that engines are designed and developed, allowing their efficiency to be increased and their cost reduced. This paper draws on ongoing Ricardo projects in the field of dedicated hybrid engines (DHEs). The Magma xEV combustion concept employs very high compression ratio, long stroke architecture, and advanced ignition and knock mitigation technologies, for DHEs requiring the highest efficiency. In the latest research project a pre-chamber combustion system (with both active and passive operation) has been applied to the Magma xEV engine, in order to enable the highest levels of charge dilution and further increase brake thermal efficiency. The research focussed on benefits of pre-chamber ignition as compared to conventional spark ignition and corona discharge ignition. The comparison of charge dilution using excess air (lean operation) and exhaust gas recirculation are presented.

The automotive market’s need for ever cleaner and more efficient powertrains, delivered to market in the shortest possible time, has prompted a revolution in digital engineering. Virtual hardware screening and engine calibration, before hardware is available is a highly time and cost-effective way of reducing development and validation testing and shortening the time to bring product to market. Model-based development workflows, to be predictive, need to offer realistic combustion rate responses to different engine characteristics such as port and fuel injector geometry. The current approach relies on a combination of empirical, phenomenological and experienced derived tools with poor accuracy outside the range of experimental data used to validate the tool chain, therefore making the exploration of unconventional solutions challenging.