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In the present work, a system approach to the tribological optimization of passenger car engines is demonstrated. Experimental data and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the role of surface specifications, ring pack, and lubricant on the piston/bore tribology. The importance of in-design “pairing” of low-viscosity motor oils with the ring pack and the cylinder bore characteristics in order to achieve maximum reduction in GHG emissions and improvement in fuel economy without sacrificing the endurance is elucidated. Earlier motored friction data for two different gasoline engines - Ford Duratec and Mercedes Benz M133 - using motor oils of different viscosity grades are now rationalized using AVL EXCITE® piston/bore tribology simulations. The main difference between the engines was the cylinder bore surface: honed cast iron vs thermally sprayed, and the valve train type: direct-acting mechanical bucket (DAMB) vs roller finger follower (RFF).

The research on reducing emissions from automotive engines through modifications in the combustion mode and the fuel type is gaining momentum because of the increasing contribution to global warming by the transportation sector. The combustion and emission formation in the advanced low temperature combustion (LTC) engine strategies are susceptible to fuel molecular composition and properties. Ignition timing in LTC strategies is primarily controlled by fuel composition and associated chemical kinetics. Thus, tailoring of fuel properties is required to address the limitations of LTC in terms of lack of control on ignition timing and narrow engine operating load range. Utilizing fuel blends and additives such as nanoparticles is a promising approach to achieving targeted fuel property. An improved understanding of fundamental processes, including fuel evaporation, is required due to its role in fuel-air mixing and emission formation in LTC.

In this work, a dynamically loaded hydrodynamic journal bearing test rig is developed and introduced. The rig is a novel design, using a hydraulic actuator with fast acting spool valves to apply load to a connecting rod. This force is transmitted through the connecting rod to the large end bearing which is mounted on a spinning shaft. The hydraulic actuator allows for fully variable control and can be used to apply either static load in compression or tension, or dynamic loading to simulate engine operation. A variable speed electric motor controls shaft speed and is synchronized to the hydraulic actuator to accurately simulate loading to represent all four engine strokes. A high precision torque meter enables direct measurements of friction torque, while shaft position is measured via a high precision encoder.

The materials commonly employed in the automotive industry are various and depend on the specific application field. For what concern the internal combustion engines the choice is guided by the thermomechanical performance required, technological constraints and production costs. Actually, for high-performance engines, steel and aluminium are the most common materials selected for the piston and the cylinder liner manufacturing. This study analyses the effect of possible material choice on the interaction between piston and cylinder liner, via Finite Element analyses. A motorcycle engine is investigated considering two possible pistons: one (standard) made of aluminium and one made of steel. Similarly, two possible cylinder liners are considered, the original one made of aluminium and a different version made of steel obtained by simply thinning the aluminium component in order to obtain two structurally equivalent components.

Thermal fatigue crack failure is becoming the most important aspect in modern cylinder head design as modern engines are striving towards higher peak cylinder pressures. Thermal cracks are developed in the cylinder head due to thermal gradients generated because of operating conditions. Paper scope comprises analytical and experimental study on reduction of combustion deck temperature and enhancing combustion deck fatigue margin of a diesel engine through introduction of scallop on the combustion face. There are methods such as cooling jacket optimization, faceplate insertion, scallops and other measures to reduce the temperatures on the combustion deck.

The present paper describes a CAE analysis approach to evaluate the transient cylinder head gasket sealing performance of a turbo charged GDI engine in the bench test development. In this approach, both transient gasket sealing force and gasket wear work are calculated to allow design engineers to find out the root cause of cylinder head gasket leakage failures. In this paper, the details of the method development are described. Firstly how to use and get the cylinder head gasket property are described, which is the basic theory and data for the gasket sealing analysis. A transient heat transfer calculation for accurately simulating the engine thermal shock test is established, which is mapped to the transient gasket sealing calculation as pivotal boundary.

The article proves the necessity for heating the air in the pneumatic engine of a hybrid power unit designed for moving a compact wheeled vehicle. The aim is to improve the pneumatic engine operation indicators by heating the compressed air before it is supplied to the cylinder using the obtained theoretical and experimental studies. For the easy-to-use of assessing the effectiveness of heating the air supplied to a pneumatic engine, the experiments were carried out by two pressure ps = 0.7 MPa and ps = 0.9 MPa, according to them the testing of a pneumatic unit was conducted without heating the compressed air at the temperature equal to the ambient temperature Ts = 293 K. Also, during the experiments a pneumatic engine was tested at other temperatures while supplying the compressed air at the inlet to the engine cylinder.

This work investigates the development of a novel series hybrid architecture utilizing a single cylinder opposed piston engine. The opposed piston engine presents unique benefits in a hybrid architecture such as its lower heat transfer due to a favorable surface area to volume ratio and lack of a cylinder head, as well as the thermodynamic benefits of two stroke operation with uniflow scavenging. A particular focus of this effort is the work extraction efficiency of two design concepts. The first design concept utilizes a geartrain to couple the crankshafts of the engine in a conventional manner, providing a single power take-off for coupling to an electric motor/generator. In this design, the large inertia of the geartrain dampens the speed fluctuation of the single cylinder engine, reducing the peak torque required to for the electric machine. However, the friction losses caused by the geartrain limit the maximum work extraction efficiency.

The goal of reducing fuel consumption and CO2-Emission is leading to turbo-charged combustion engines that deliver high torque at low speeds (down speeding). To meet NVH requirements damper technologies such as DMF (Dual Mass Flywheel) are established, leading to reduced space for the clutch system. Specific measures need to be considered if switching over from SMF (Single Mass Flywheel) to DMF [8]. Doing so has an impact on thermal behavior of the clutch system, for example due to reduced and different distribution of thermal masses and heat transfer to the surroundings. Taking these trends into account, clutch systems within vehicle powertrains are facing challenges to meet requirements e.g. clutch life, cost targets and space limitation. The clutch development process must also ensure delivery of a clutch system that meets requirements taking boundary conditions such as load cycles and driver behavior into account.

The dynamic effects of a coolant flow rate variation on knock tendency are experimentally investigated on a small S.I. engine. The analysis concerns the transient response of the unburned gas temperature and the knock onset to a step variation in load and coolant flow rate. This phenomenological investigation aims at preventing knock through a proper thermal management as an efficient alternative to the currently adopted strategies. Moreover, the proposed approach may result particularly useful for hybrid-electric powertrain, where the engine is expected to operate in the highest efficiency region by adopting high compression ratios and full stoichiometric map. The analysis is carried out through an experimental campaign, where the control of cylinder wall temperature is achieved by means of an electrically driven water pump. The spark advance and the air/fuel ratio have been properly varied in order to operate with advanced spark timing and stoichiometric mixture at full load.

Fuel spray impingement on the combustion chamber wall cannot be avoid in direct injection gasoline engines, resulting in insufficient combustion and unburned hydrocarbon/soot emissions from the engines. And the microscopic characteristics of the impinging spray have a close relation with the fuel film formation, which has a direct effect on the engine performance and emissions. Therefore, figuring out the droplet behaviors of the impinging spray is significantly important for improving the engine performance and reducing emissions. However, the microscopic characteristics of the impinging spray have not been deeply understood and the differences between the impinging and free spray are seldom mentioned in previous study. Therefore, particle image analysis (PIA) technique was applied to detect the microscopic characteristics at the capture location in order to track the droplet behaviors of the spray tip during the propagation process.

Since a significant part of energy losses in the internal combustion engine comes from viscous dissipation, the trend has shifted toward low-viscosity oils from SAE 40 and 50 in the 1960s-1980s to current SAE 20 and lower viscosity grades. Use of low viscosity engine oils significantly reduces energy losses in the main bearing and piston/bore systems, while tribological stresses on the valvetrain - especially in flat-tappet cammed engines - may increase. This makes a strong argument for deploying new classes of friction modifiers and antiwear additives. However, development of a balanced formulation is not as straightforward as it appears, and numerous pitfalls may be encountered due to additive interactions. Another serious problem is that the definition of “fuel-economy engine oil” is rather vague, as it depends on choice of reference oil. Nowadays, the assessment of fuel economy is often based on the Sequence VIE or VIF tests using a 2012 3.6L GM V6 gasoline engine.

Compared to conventional diesel combustion (CDC), isobaric combustion can achieve a similar or higher indicated efficiency, lower heat transfer losses, reduced nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions; however, with a penalty of soot emissions. While the engine performance and exhaust emissions of isobaric combustion are well known, the overall flame development, in particular, the flow-field details within the flames are unclear. In this study, the performance analysis of CDC and two isobaric combustion cases was conducted, followed by high-speed imaging of Mie-scattering and soot luminosity in an optically accessible, single-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine. From the soot luminosity imaging, qualitative flow-fields were obtained using flame image velocimetry (FIV). The peak motoring pressure (PMP) and peak cylinder pressure (PCP) of CDC are kept fixed at 50 and 70 bar, respectively.

Isobaric combustion has shown the potential of improving engine efficiency by lowering the heat transfer losses. Previous studies have achieved isobaric combustion through multiple injections from a single central injector, controlling injection timing and duration of the injection. In this study, we employed three injectors, i.e. one centrally mounted (C) on the cylinder head and two side-injectors (S), slant-mounted on cylinder head protruding their nozzle tip near piston-bowl to achieve the isobaric combustion. This study visualized the flame development of isobaric combustion, linking flow-field details to the observed trends in engine efficiency and soot emissions. The experiments were conducted in an optically accessible single-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine using n-heptane as fuel. Isobaric combustion, with a 50 bar peak pressure, was achieved with three different injection strategies, i.e. (C+S), (S+C), and (S+S).

The combustion process in spark-ignition engines can vary considerably cycle by cycle, which may result in unstable engine operation. The phenomena amplify in natural gas (NG) spark-ignition (SI) engines due to the lower NG laminar flame speed compared to gasoline, and more so under lean burn conditions. The main goal of this study was to investigate the main sources and the characteristics of the cycle-by-cycle variation in heavy-duty compression ignition (CI) engines converted to NG SI operation. The experiments were conducted in a single-cylinder optically-accessible CI engine with a flat bowl-in piston that was converted to NG SI. The engine was operated at medium load under lean operating conditions, using pure methane as a natural gas surrogate. The CI to SI conversion was made through the addition of a low-pressure NG injector in the intake manifold and of a NG spark plug in place of the diesel injector.

Knock is one of the main limitations on Spark-Ignited (SI) Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) performance and efficiency and so has been the object of study for over one hundred years. Great strides have been made in terms of understanding in that time, but certain rather elementary practical problems remain. One of these is how to interpret if a running engine is knocking and how likely this is to result in damage. Knocking in a development environment is typically quantified based on numerical descriptions of the high frequency content of a cylinder pressure signal. Certain key frequencies are observed, which Draper [1] explained with fundamental acoustic theory back in 1935. Since then, a number of approaches of varying complexity have been employed to correlate what is happening within the chamber with what is measured by a pressure transducer.

Homogeneous lean spark-ignited combustion is known for its thermodynamic advantages over conventional stoichiometric combustion but remains a challenge due to combustion instability, engine knock and NOx emissions especially at higher engine loads above the naturally aspirated limit. Investigations have shown that lean combustion can partly suppress knock, which is why the concept may be particularly advantageous in high load, boosted operation in downsized engines with high compression ratios. However, the authors have previously shown that this is not true for all cases due to the appearance of a lean load limit, which is defined by the convergence of the knock limit and combustion stability limit. Therefore, further research has been conducted with the alternative and potentially renewable fuel methane which has higher resistance to autoignition compared to gasoline.

To reproduce wall quenching phenomena using 3D-CFD, a wall quenching model was constructed based on the Peclet number. The model was further integrated with the flame propagation model. Combustion analysis showed that that a large amount of unburned hydrocarbons (UHCs) remained in the piston clevis and small gaps. Furthermore, the model was capable of predicting the increase in UHC emissions when there was a delay in the ignition time. The flame front cells were plotted on Peters' premixed turbulent combustion diagram to identify transitions in the combustion states. It was found that the flame surface transitioned from corrugated flamelets through thin reaction zones to wrinkled flamelets and further to laminar flamelets, which led to wall quenching. The turbulent Reynolds number (Re) decreased rapidly due to the increase in laminar flame speed and flame thickness and the decrease in turbulent intensity and turbulent scale.

Natural gas as an internal combustion engine fuel is taking a predominant role as a mid-term solution to pollution due to combustion driven human activities both in the energy and transport sectors. Engine researchers and manufacturers are in the process of investigating and improving strategies that decrease emissions and fuel consumption, without compromising engine performance and efficiency; active pre-chamber configurations are to be accounted for as one of these. A relatively small amount of fuel (up to 10 % of the total fuel-energy requirement) is introduced in the confined volume of the pre-chamber and forms a close-to-stoichiometric mixture with fresh charge that is introduced from the main combustion chamber during the compression stroke. After spark-ignition the products of this early stage of combustion can ignite ultra-lean mixtures (with λ up to 2) through the Turbulent Jet Ignition mechanism, hence reducing fuel consumption as well as noxious emissions such as NOx.

Fun to drive and drivability are important issues in modern vehicles, and the propulsion system plays a key role in achieving these goals. Today most engines are characterized by the presence of a turbocharging system to achieve a high level of specific power and efficiency. Unfortunately, turbocharged engines are characterized by a delay in the delivery of toque, especially at low load and low speed, a phenomenon commonly called turbo-lag. In this paper an innovative turbocharging system is studied with the aim of providing a solution to this annoying behavior; a hybrid boosting system consisting of a traditional turbocharger and an electrically assisted compressor is analyzed. This architecture, especially thanks to the good dynamic behavior of the e-compressor, achieves the goal of an important reduction in terms of time-to-boost, providing an important improvement in engine readiness.