Piston Concept, Design and Testing for Extreme High Efficiency Internal Combustion Engine Development

Paolo Ortolani; Alex Hall

doi:10.4271/2022-01-0598

The main objective of this work is to describe the approach used and the results achieved on test bench, specifically for the piston design and development, which supports efficiency demonstration for a new class of internal combustion engine.

In this era of ICE revolution rather than evolution, although the piston function remains the same, the working boundary conditions are drastically changing, and the development time is often compressed in favor of a shorter time to market.

In this paper, piston requirements, functions, design and testing results from a development program on a Heavy Duty Recuperated Split Cycle Engine are reported. This includes the strategy for a fast and cost-efficient modification of the compression/expansion ratio, the technology and the materials used for reduction of heat losses, and a thermal expansion study, which supports material selection for the structure and the thermal barrier coating, to optimize piston function.

This work is based on available information, requirements, hypothesis & problem simplification, supported by virtual validation, FEM analysis, spreadsheet calculation, component specifications and performance leading to the final piston design.

This work includes the development done on suppliers’ side in order to fulfil the project requirements, the tradeoff between technology selection and the pressing need to respect an extremely short time frame for parts procurement.

This work is referring to a specific component, but the methodology described in this paper has been generally developed for the new class of ICE and can be successfully applied to other base engine components about the common key points (time to market, fuel efficiency, development costs).

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Piston Concept, Design and Testing for Extreme High Efficiency Internal Combustion Engine Development 2022-01-0598

SAE MOBILUS