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It is now well established that highly turbulent flows in engines are responsible for cycle-to-cycle aerodynamic variations particularly in cylinder. These dispersions may lead to macroscopic changes in flow pattern from one cycle to another one, which are quite different from “true turbulence” (in fact small scale turbulent fluctuations) used to optimize combustion. It is of a great importance to decrease these variations which may effect reliability of combustion concept and particularly when looking to decrease idle engine speed. The difficulty in separating “true turbulence” from cyclic variations is that there is no limit between two kinds of fluctuations. To analyze aerodynamic, PIV is well adapted to study these phenomena and is now currently used in development process, allowing to measure instantaneous aerodynamics field to determine for instance vortex center position for each cycle.

Previous studies of in-cylinder heat transfers give numerous approaches of heat losses modelling principally compression and expansion strokes. These simulation methods are discussed showing that their accuracy during the intake stroke is neglected. Since most of the modern engines use strong structured air motion during the intake and compression strokes to both reduce consumption and reach different emissions levels targets, one may focus on in-cylinder aerodynamics and convective heat transfer coupling. The experimental velocity data acquired allow us to get an in-depth understanding of the spatial and temporal gradients of measured heat transfers in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine. Two different experimental methods have been used to investigate the in-cylinder air motion. First, near wall flow has been studied using two component local time-resolved Laser Doppler Anemometry (LDA).