Search Results

In this study, effects of altitude on free diesel spray morphology, macroscopic spray characteristics and air-fuel mixing process were investigated. The diesel spray visualization experiment using high-speed photography was performed in a constant volume chamber which reproduced the injection diesel-like thermodynamic conditions of a heavy-duty turbocharged diesel engine operating at sea level and 1000 m, 2000 m, 3000 m and 4500 m above sea level. The results showed that the spray morphology became narrower and longer at higher altitude, and small vortex-like structures were observed on the downstream spray periphery. Spray penetration increased and spray angle decreased with increasing altitude. At altitudes of 0 m, 1000 m, 2000 m, 3000 m and 4500 m, the spray penetration at 1.45 ms after start of injection (ASOI) were 79.54 mm, 80.51 mm, 81.49 mm, 83.29 mm and 88.92 mm respectively, and the spray angle were 10.9°, 10.8°, 10.7°, 10.4°and 9.8° respectively.

Engine compartment thermal management can achieve energy saving and emission reduction. The structural design of the components in the engine compartment affects the thermal fluid flow performance, which in turn affects the thermal management performance. In this paper, based on the phenomenon that the surface of the parts in the engine compartment is abnormally high due to design defects of an SUV engine compartment bottom shield, the engine compartment is modeled and analyzed by CFD using the software STAR-CCM+. It is not conducive to the heat dissipation, so the bottom shield needs to be redesigned. To redesign the shape of the bottom shield, four dimensions and one coordinate value were selected as the design parameters, and the oil pan maximum surface temperature was selected as the optimization target. The Latin hypercube sampling method was used to sample the space uniformly, and the experimental design plan was constructed and simulated.

Ethanol reforming gas combined with EGR technology can not only improve thermal efficiency, but also reduce pollutant emission under lean combustion condition. In this investigation, GT-Power is used to carry out one-dimensional simulation model calculation and analysis to explore the combustion characteristics, economy performance of a direct injection gasoline engine when the excess air coefficient (λ) increases from 1 to 1.3 and the ethanol reforming gas mixing ratio increases from 0% to 30% at the working condition of 2000 r/min and 10 bar. Then the EGR system is introduced to deeply discuss the working characteristics of the direct injection gasoline engine when the EGR rate increases from 0% to 20%. The results show that the increase of λ leads to the decrease of in-cylinder pressure and the delay of the peak of cylinder pressure.

In the ultra-lean combustion mode, the combustion temperature is relatively low, which is expected to avoid the high-temperature NOx generation. And it also can use excess air to fully oxidize CO, HC and Soot, to achieve cleaner combustion. But at the same time, ultra-lean combustion has difficulties in ignition and flame propagation. This paper used CONVERGE to simulate the combustion process and products of a new ultra-lean combustion mode, which ignited the ultra-lean premixed fuel/air mixture with the spark-ignited micro-fuel-jet, in a constant-volume vessel with a 6-hole GDI injector. The differences of combustion processes and products were simulated for two spark-ignition positions, including ‘on’ the micro-jet spray and ‘between’ two micro-jet sprays. It was found that the combustion duration (the time for burned-fuel-ratio from 10% to 90%) could be shortened by about 14.3% if igniting ‘on’ the micro-jet spray, but the amount of NOx generated would increase about 21.0%.

Diesel engine is vital in the industry for its characteristics of low fuel consumption, high-torque, reliability, and durability. Existing diesel engine technology has reached the upper limit. It is difficult to break through the fuel consumption and emission of diesel engines. VVA (Variable Valve Actuation) is a new technology in the field of the diesel engines. In this paper, GT-Suite and ANN (artificial neural network) model are established based on engine experimental data and DoE simulation results. By inputting Intake Valve Opening crake angle (IVO), Intake Valve Angle Multiplier (IVAM) and Exhaust Valve Angle Multiplier (EVAM) into the ANN Model, and by using SA (simulated annealing algorithm), the optimized results of intake and exhaust valve lift under the target conditions are obtained.

It has been revealed by researches that lubricant properties have a great effect on the low-speed pre-ignition (LSPI) frequency in downsizing turbocharged direct-injection engines which are developed for better fuel economy. Droplets of lubricant or lubricant-gasoline mixture are considered to be the potential pre-ignition sources. Those droplets fly into the combustion chamber and ignite the gasoline-air mixture. To study lubricant droplets fundamentally, a novel set of droplet auto-ignition system is designed based on a Dibble Burner for this experiment. Influences of metallic additive contents, viscosities, lubricant diluted with gasoline and waste lubricant on the ignition delay of droplets are investigated by testing 12 groups of lubricants or lubricant-gasoline mixture. The equivalent diameter of each droplet generated by micro-syringes is around 2.1 mm. The co-flow temperature varies from 1123 K to 1223 K, and the experiments are carried out at atmospheric pressure.

During current design process of vehicle engine exhaust system, the frequently-used approach mainly concerns an individual component, which usually results in not meeting the overall design requirements or unreasonable design parameters. Here a concept of comprehensive evaluation metrics for vehicle engine exhaust system was established, of which a new weight factor assignment method was proposed, named change rate method, as the core of evaluation system to be especially studied. Taking muffler as an instance, six weight factor assignment schemes were adopted to compare with each other. And the rationality and practicability of the change rate assignment method was verified by the muffler noise experiments. The results show that, the change rate method makes the weight assignment more scientific and rigorous. And the new method can reflect the wishes of designers and completely displays the performance comparison and evaluation between schemes.

This paper presents a study of the Hydrogen/Argon lifted flames in a hot vitiated co-flow. The effects of the dilution of argon in central fuel, the volume fraction of argon in the central fuel, co-flow temperature and the velocity of the central jet on the flame lift-off length were studied, and the numerical simulation with PDF model were analyzed as well. The results could provide theoretical supports for the research of the hydrogen fueled argon cycle engine which is a potential way not only to increase the indicated thermal efficiency of internal combustion engine but also realize the zero emission. The result shows that at the same boundary condition the central jet of H2+Ar has a lower lift-off length than the central jet of H2+N2. By the numerical simulation, the jet flame of H2+Ar has a higher maximum temperature and maximum OH concentration. It indicated that the dilution of argon could promote the combustion reaction.

Spark ignition systems with the capability of providing spark event with either higher current level or longer discharge duration has been developed in recent years to help IC engines towards clean combustion with higher efficiency under lean/diluted intake charge. In this research, a boosted current spark strategy was proposed to investigate the effect of spark discharge current level and discharge duration on the combustion process. Firstly, the discharge characteristics of a boosted current spark system were tested with a traditional spark plug under crossflow conditions, and results showed that the spark channel was more stable, and was stretched much longer when the discharge current was boosted. Then the boosted current strategy was used in a spark ignition engine operating under lean conditions. Boosted current was added to the spark channel with different timing, duration, and current levels.

The CO2 reduction request for automotive industry promotes the efforts on the engine thermal efficiency improvement. The goal of this research is to improve the thermal efficiency on an extremely downsized 3-cylinder 1.0 L turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine. Effects of compression ratio, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), valve timing and viscosity of oil on fuel economy were studied. The results show that increasing compression ratio, from 9.6 to 12, can improve fuel economy at relative low load (below 12 bar BMEP), but has a negative effect at high load due to increased knock intensity. EGR can significantly reduce the pumping loss at low load, optimize combustion phase and reduce exhaust gas temperature. Therefore, the fuel consumption is reduced at all test points. The average brake thermal efficiency (BTE) benefit percentage is 3.47% with 9.6 compression ratio and 5.33 % with 12 compression ratio.

Compared with ordinary gasoline, using ethanol gasoline blends as fuel of Internal Combustion Engine is beneficial for the performance of power, economy and emission of engine. However, the fuel ethanol blended in ethanol gasoline blends currently is usually anhydrous ethanol, which requires dewatering implementer in production process, and the cost is high. Therefore, the production cost can be significantly reduced by replacement of anhydrous ethanol with hydrous ethanol while exerting the advantage of ethanol gasoline blends. In this study, computation fluid dynamics (CFD) software CONVERGE is employed to establish a simulation model of an actual gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine, and investigate the effect of burning hydrous ethanol gasoline blends and different injection strategy on combustion process and emission, and the validity of the model was validated by experiments.

The motor has vibration characteristics of order and multi-band in the frequency domain, which is different from the internal combustion engine when it is used as the vehicle’s drive. These characteristics cannot be briefly attenuated by general methods, but make the phononic crystal (PC) an ideal solution to eliminate the vibration transmission of the motor, because the concentrated vibration peak can easily be blocked by the bandgap. In this paper, one dimensional locally resonant phononic crystal (LRPC) which has low-frequency bandgaps are arranged on the automotive subframe to absorbing vibration. The partial coherence analysis is used to analyze the transfer characteristic of vibration on the subframe. Then, 6 main paths are selected from the 18 vibration transmission paths, based on its high ratio of partial coherence coefficient in a certain frequency, and the arranged position, the spring stiffness and the resonator’s mass of the LRPCs are chosen based on this result.

The Argon Power Cycle engine is a novel concept for high efficiency and zero emission through the replacement of N2 by Ar. However, the higher in-cylinder temperature and pressure as by-products cause heavier knock. The anti-knock strategies, such as reducing compression ratio and retarding ignition time, offset the efficiency increased by the Argon Power Cycle. Therefore, knock control becomes the most urgent task for the Argon Power Cycle engine development. The anti-knock methods, including fuel replacement, ultra-lean combustion, high dilution combustion, and water injection, were considered. The simulated ignition delay times were used to evaluate the probability of knock. The Otto cycle, combined with chemical equilibrium, was utilized to confirm the effect on the thermal conversion efficiency and each in-cylinder thermodynamic state parameter. The results show that the ignition delay times increase by a factor of two when the Ar dilution ratio increases from 79% to 95%.

To mitigate the global warming and to develop sustainable transportation, investigations on combustion properties of carbon neutral fuels i.e., electro-fuels and bio-fuels such as propanol and butanol are essential. In the past, there were very limited researches concerning the fuel-lean combustion of those fuels, which is however a promising method for reducing the NOx emissions. Moreover, the literature chemical kinetic mechanisms have not been widely validated against the fuel-lean combustion data. Ignition delay time (IDT) is one key parameter and is widely used for validation of chemical kinetic mechanisms. The measurements of IDTs of diluted 1-propanol (nC3H7OH, CH3CH2CH2OH) and 1-butanol (nC4H9OH, CH3CH2CH2CH2OH) mixtures (with 90% bath gas (Ar+N2)) were therefore conducted in a rapid compression machine (RCM), at temperatures between 800 and 1000 K, pressures of 20 and 40 bar, under lean combustion conditions with equivalence ratios (ф) of 0.25, 0.5 and 0.9.

An increasing demand for vehicle noise control has been proposed and at the same time, vehicle weight and fuel economy have become critical for the automotive industry. The methodology of statistical energy analysis (SEA) is used to balance both light weight and high noise insulation performance. In this paper, the vehicle dash and floor sound package systems, which are two of the major paths for vehicle interior noise, are studied and optimized by CAE and testing technology. Two types of sound packages which are the conventional insulation system and the lightweight one are chosen for the vehicle dash and floor system. The vehicle dash and floor systems are modeled by SEA and the transmission loss (TL) of the dash and floor system is analyzed, respectively. Several influence factors of the TL are also analyzed, such as sound package coverage, the leaks, etc.

The improvement of environmental performance by gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine is remarkable. But the gas mixture formation process, which greatly affects the combustion of direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines, still has a lot of areas left unclear. In this paper, a CFD model of air intake, fuel spray atomization and mixture formation process of a certain GDI engine was developed and experimentally verified for DISI injection study. The effects of injector spray layout and injection strategy on mixture quality of DISI engine were analyzed by respective simulation of three different injectors T1470, T1471, T1472. Results show that the mixture quality can be improved with appropriate injector spray orifices layout.

Fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles (FCHEVs) composed of fuel cells and batteries can improve the dynamic response and durability of vehicle propulsion. In addition, braking energy can be recovered by batteries. The energy management strategy (EMS) for distributing the requested power through different types of energy sources plays an important role in FCHEVs. Reasonable power split not only improves vehicle performance but also enhances fuel economy. In this paper, considering the power tracking control strategy which is widely adopted in Advanced Vehicle Simulator (ADVISOR), a constrained nonlinear programming parameter optimization model is established for minimizing fuel consumption. The principal parameters of power tracking control strategy are set as the optimized variables, with the dynamic performance index of FCHEVs being defined as the constraint condition. Then, the genetic algorithm (GA) is applied in the control strategy design for solving the optimization problem.

Low heat rejection (LHR) combustion has been recognized as a potential technology for further fuel economy improvement. This paper aims to simulate how the piston top’s thermal barrier coating affects the engine’s thermal efficiency and emissions. Accordingly, a Thin-wall heat transfer model in AVL Fire software was employed. The effects of increasing the piston top surface temperature, comparing different thermal barrier coating material, were simulated at the engine’s rated power operating point, so as the piston top’s surface roughness. In comparison to a standard diesel engine, the indicated thermal efficiency (ITE) could increase by 0.4% when the surface temperature of the piston top changed from 575K to 775K.

Intelligent and connected vehicle (ICV) and new energy vehicle (NEV) will be two important directions of the automotive technology in the future, and the coordinated development of these two directions reflects relevantly the higher requirements put forward by nowadays society and people. Through the use of intelligent and connected technology (ICT), NEVs can exchange various traffic information data with the outside world (e.g. other running vehicles, road infrastructure, internet, etc.) in real time, which is so-called Vehicle to Everything (V2X). Based on the further analysis of the mutual traffic information, the vehicles can identify the current driving conditions and predict the future driving conditions effectively, which can realize the real time optimization of the energy management strategies (EMSs) of vehicles’ powertrain system, so as to meet the driving requirements of vehicles under different driving conditions.

To meet the increasingly stringent nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission regulations of diesel engines, the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx with ammonia (NH3) has become the current mainstream technical route. Experiments in the present study included the performance of Cu-Beta catalyst and Cu-CHA catalyst before and after hydrothermal aging, and the effects of Cu content, feed gas space velocity (GHSV), NH3/NOx ratio, and sulfur poisoning on the performance of Cu-CHA catalyst. In the low temperature range (T≤250 °C), the T50 and T90 of Cu-Beta catalyst are 139 °C and 165 °C, respectively, while those of Cu-CHA catalyst are 150 °C and 183 °C, respectively. In the high temperature range (T>400 °C), the NOx conversion of Cu-CHA catalyst is generally higher than that of Cu-Beta catalyst. The temperature window of Cu-Beta catalyst is 154 to 514 °C, while that of Cu-CHA catalyst is 168 to 522 °C. Cu-CHA catalyst exhibits better catalytic activity at medium and high temperatures.