Search Results

The interactive use of a vehicle-trailer handling model is presented. The model is a high resolution simulation of general vehicle (passenger cars to multitrailer) handling, braking, and vehicle-barrier interaction which is exercised interactively with a “human driver” over a realistic road (pavement, shoulder, median strip, etc.). At all times during the simulation, the operator can simulate the use of any normally available controls, i.e., steering, braking, throttle. The model has been developed and/or used over a number of years under various contracts with NHTSA, FHWA, DOD, and a number of industrial companies. Included in the paper are the results of a simulation run involving driver performance, vehicle parameters, and roadway conditions.

The current investigation delves into the thermal stresses encountered by internal combustion engine pistons during the combustion process and explores the impact of high heat transfer through metallic engine components on overall thermal efficiency. The study focuses on a steady-state thermal analysis of a diesel engine piston model, incorporating a semitransparent ceramic coating on its surface. Utilizing Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software from SolidWorks, the research simulates temperature profiles on both the top surface of the piston and its substrate. The model incorporates an internal heat source, its magnitude calculated based on the coating's heat radiation absorbance values. The investigation considers Zirconia, Aluminum, and Titanium ceramic-based coatings with varying thicknesses.

In a context of growing concern for vehicle-related CO2 and pollutant emissions, non-conventional fuels like methanol (CH3OH) represent a valid alternative to fossil fuels to decarbonize the transport sector in a reasonable time. This is mainly due to its lower carbon content, compared to conventional gasoline and diesel. Moreover, methanol can be obtained either from biomass or CO2 capture from the atmosphere, which makes the latter a renewable fuel. Given the possibility of being stored in liquid phase at standard temperature and pressure (STP), methanol is very suitable for Light Duty Vehicles (LDVs), in which the need to contain fuel tank dimensions is relevant. Regarding the deployment of methanol as a fuel, it is not very challenging, as it can be adopted in current production Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) either in pure form or in blend with other fuels without any significant modifications.

Ammonia, with its significant hydrogen content, offers a practical alternative to pure hydrogen in marine applications and is easier to store due to its higher volumetric energy density. While Ammonia's resistance to auto-ignition makes it suitable for high-compression ratio engines using pre-mixed charge, its low flame speed poses challenges. Innovative combustion strategies, such as dual-fuel and reactivity-controlled compression ignition (RCCI), leverage secondary high-reactivity fuels like diesel to enhance Ammonia combustion. To address the challenges posed by Ammonia's low flame speed, blending with hydrogen or natural gas (NG) in the low reactivity portion of the fuel mixture is an effective approach. For combustion simulation in engines, it is crucial to develop a chemical kinetics mechanism that accommodates all participating fuels: diesel, Ammonia, hydrogen, and NG. This study aims to propose a kinetics mechanism applicable for the combustion of these fuels together.

The lack of a homogeneous air-fuel mixture in internal combustion engines is a major cause of pollutant emissions, such as carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbons (HC). This paper focuses on the design, simulation, and testing of a modified air intake pipe for a gas engine, incorporating deflectors to induce a swirl effect in the air-fuel mixture. To determine the optimal configuration for the deflectors and the diameter of the air intake pipe, several Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations were conducted. The best results were then tested on a real gas engine. The primary objective of this study is to offer a solution for increasing the homogeneity level of the air-fuel mixture in gas engines, without requiring significant changes to engine components. In this case, achieving this goal involves only relatively small modifications to the air intake pipe.

Reduction of CO2 emissions from transportation is mandatory to limit global warming. New Energy Vehicles (NEV) need to be used widely in order to reach this goal. NEV include Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV). From a Life Cycle Analysis point of view, considering the CO2 emissions produced by battery manufacturing and during vehicle use, the most promising technology is the PHEV operating on green fuels. However, the internal combustion engine remains a source of gaseous pollution in urban areas. The combustion process has to be further improved to comply with latest and most stringent exhaust emission standards. One way to achieve this objective is the use of eco-friendly fuels like hydrogen to reduce engine-out emissions (NOx, soot and CO2) in PHEV system.

Although methane number is widely used to predict knocking occurrence and its intensity, it does not determine a fuel composition uniquely, that means, the knocking intensity by the different composition fuel must show difference even if the same methane number fuels are employed. To establish a novel index, the knocking intensity and the autoignitive propagation velocity, as consequence of spontaneous ignition process, are investigated both experimentally and numerically by using the different composition gaseous fuels with same methane number. Methane/ethane/air and methane/n-butane/air mixtures with the same methane number of 70 and the equivalence ratio of 0.5 were employed. They are rapidly compressed and ignited spontaneously by a Rapid Compression Machine. Ignition delay times, autoignitive propagation velocities, and knocking intensity were measured by acquired pressure histories and high-speed imaging.

The authors developed a gasoline engine that combined direct injection and port fuel injection in order to improve fuel economy for motorcycles. Compared to passenger car engines, motorcycle engines generally have smaller displacement and operate at higher engine speed, so the bore and stroke are generally smaller than those of passenger cars. Therefore, the direct injection spray characteristics optimized for small bore and stroke were selected to reduce fuel adhesion to various parts of the combustion chamber wall. In addition, this engine employed the high tumble intake port that can both strengthen turbulence intensity and suppress the decrease in volumetric efficiency to a lower level. Also, stratification of air-fuel mixture and split injection were employed for reducing catalyst warm-up time and soot. The results showed that excellent fuel economy was achieved without sacrificing engine output performance while meeting emissions regulations.

Liquid fuel attached to the wall surface of the intake port, the piston and the combustion chamber is one of the main causes of the unburned hydrocarbon emissions from a port fueled SI engine, especially during transient operations. To investigate the liquid fuel film formation process and fuel film behavior during transient operation is essential to reduce exhaust emissions in real driving operations, including cold start operations. Optical techniques have been often applied to measure the fuel film in conventional reports, however, it is difficult to apply those previous techniques to actual engines during transient operations. In this study, using MEMS technique, a novel capacitance sensor has been developed to detect liquid fuel film formation and evaporation processes in actual engines. A resistance temperature detector (RTD) was also constructed on the MEMS sensor with the capacitance sensor to measure the sensor surface temperature.

The transportation sector, and commercial vehicles in particular, play an important role in global CO2 emissions. For this reason, the EU recently decided to reduce CO2 emissions from commercial vehicles by 30% until 2030. One alternative to conventional diesel propulsion is the usage of stoichiometric natural gas combustion. Due to the lowered C/H ratio and the cost effective exhaust after treatment (EAT) in form of a three way catalyst (TWC), less CO2 is emitted and it is possible to comply even with most stringent NOX legislations. However, the stoichiometric combustion of natural gas has also disadvantages. In particular, the throttling and retarded 50 % mass fuel burned (MFB50) positions due to knocking lead to efficiency losses. One way to minimize these is the usage of exhaust gas re-circulation (EGR), Miller cycle and water injection. The reduced knocking tendency allows the geometric compression ratio to be increased further, which leads to an additional efficiency advantage.

Renewably sourced hydrogen is seen as promising sustainable carbon-free alternative to conventional fossil fuels for use in hard to decarbonize sectors. As the hydrogen supply builds up, dual-fuel hydrogen-diesel engines have a particular advantage of fuel flexibility as they can operate only on diesel fuel in case of supply shortages, in addition to the simplicity of engine modification. The dual-fuel compression ignition strategy initiates combustion of hydrogen using short pilot-injections of diesel fuel into the combustion chamber. In the context of such engine combustion process, the impact of hydrogen addition on the ignition and combustion behavior of a pilot diesel-spray is investigated in a heavy-duty, single-cylinder, optical engine. To this end, the spatial and temporal evolution of two-stage autoignition of a diesel-fuel surrogate, n-heptane, injected into a premixed charge of hydrogen and air is studied using optical diagnostics.

Ammonia (NH3) is a carbon-free fuel, which could partially or completely eliminate hydrocarbon (HC) fuel demand. Using ammonia directly as a fuel has some challenges due to its low burning speed and low flammability range, which generates unstable combustion inside the combustion chamber. This study investigated the effect of two different compression ratios (CRs) of 10.5 and 12.5 on the performance of ammonia combustion by using a conventional single spark-ignition (SI) approach. It was found that at a lower CR of 10.5, the combustion was unstable even at advanced spark timing (ST) due to poor combustion characteristics of ammonia. However, increasing the CR to 12.5 improved the engine performance significantly with lower cyclic variations. In addition, this research work also observed the effect of multiple spark ignition strategies on pure ammonia combustion and compared it with the conventional SI approach for the same operating conditions.

In the present work, five surrogate components (n-Hexadecane, n-Tetradecane, Heptamethylnonane, Decalin, 1-Methylnaphthalene) are proposed to represent liquid phase of diesel fuel, and another different five surrogate components (n-Decane, n-Heptane, iso-Octane, MCH (methylcyclohexane), Toluene) are proposed to represent vapor phase of diesel fuel. For the vapor phase, a 5-component surrogate chemical kinetic mechanism has been developed and validated. In the mechanism, a recently updated H2/O2/CO/C1 detailed sub-mechanism is adopted for accurately predicting the laminar flame speeds over a wide range of operating conditions, also a recently updated C2-C3 detailed sub-mechanism is used due to its potential benefit on accurate flame propagation simulation. For each of the five diesel vapor surrogate components, a skeletal sub-mechanism, which determines the simulation of ignition delay times, is constructed for species C4-Cn.

The race towards zero carbon emissions is ongoing with the need to reduce the consumption of fossil energy resources. This demands immediate and reliable developments regarding technical environmentally friendly solutions for the power and transportation sectors. An alternative way to achieve a carbon-free powertrain is the use of green hydrogen for internal combustion engines. In this work the self-designed Fraunhofer single-cylinder engine with a displacement volume of 430 mm3 developed for extreme lean combustion and passive pre-chamber ignition was adapted for hydrogen engine operation. With hydrogen combustion, the customized cooling system resulting in low metal temperatures is simulated and optimized to avoid hot spots in the combustion chamber. The investigated single-cylinder engine is characterized by a compression ratio of 12.2, port fuel injection and a conventional spark plug.

The high injection pressure and small cylinder volume of direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines can result in flat-wall wetness on the surface of the piston, increasing fuel consumption and pollutant emissions. The characteristics of microscopic fuel adhesion are observed using refractive index matching (RIM). Fuel adhesion characteristics after wall impingement are evaluated with various cross-flow velocities under triple stage injection conditions. The results indicate that cross-flow has a beneficial effect on the diffusion of fuel spray. Average fuel adhesion thickness decreases with an increase in cross-flow velocities. Furthermore, cross-flow promotes the evaporation of fuel adhesion, which leads to a reduction in the fuel adhesion mass/mass ratio. The improvement of injection strategy has guidance on low-carbon future.

We propose a novel dual-fuel combustion model for simulating heavy-duty engines with the G-Equation. Dual-Fuel combustion strategies in such engines features direct injection of a high-reactivity fuel into a lean, premixed chamber which has a high resistance to autoignition. Distinct combustion modes are present: the DI fuel auto-ignites following chemical ignition delay after spray vaporization and mixing; a reactive front is formed on its surroundings; it develops into a well-structured turbulent flame, which propagates within the premixed charge. Either direct chemistry or the flame-propagation approach (G- Equation), taken alone, do not produce accurate results. The proposed Dual-Fuel model decides what regions of the combustion chamber should be simulated with either approach, according to the local flame state; and acts as a “kernel” model for the G- Equation model. Direct chemistry is run in the regions where a premixed front is not present.

Carbon-neutral (CN) fuels will be part of the solution to reducing global warming effects of the transportation sector, along with electrification. CN fuels such as hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels, and e-fuels can play a primary role in some segments (aviation, shipping, heavy-duty road vehicles) and a secondary role in others (light-duty road vehicles). The composition and properties of these fuels vary substantially from existing fossil fuels. Fuel effects on performance and emissions are complex, especially when these fuels are blended with fossil fuels. Predictively modeling the combustion of these fuels in engine and combustor CFD simulations requires accurate representation of the fuel blends. We discuss a methodology for matching the targeted fuel properties of specific CN fuels, using a blend of surrogate fuel components, to form a fuel model that can accurately capture fuel effects in an engine simulation.

Engine oil consumption must be reduced because it produces particulate matter in exhaust gases and poisons the catalyst in an aftertreatment system. Oil transport upward via piston ring gaps is one of the factors for oil consumption. It is known that piston rings rotate circumferentially during engine operation, and that oil consumption increases when the ring gaps of multiple piston rings are close to each other. Force acting on a piston ring in the circumferential direction was investigated in a past study [3], and a wave form of the force was measured against the crank angle. Furthermore, the forces were varied according to the measurement position in the circumferential direction. It means that the ring gap tends to stay where the force showed a small value. The force shows a periodic wave form against the crank angle for each cycle, and some parts of the waveform show a correlation with piston slap motion [3].

To achieve carbon-neutrality, internal combustion engines need to further improve their thermal efficiency to reduce CO2 emissions. To accomplish this, it is necessary to quantify and enhance five factors that control indicated thermal efficiency: compression ratio, specific heat ratio, combustion duration, combustion timing, and heat transfer to wall. In this work, quantitative targets for each factor were defined, which were derived from a simulation that considered the influence of heterogeneity of diesel combustion on thermal efficiency. The simulation utilized a two-zone combustion model. In particular, the targets for the combustion duration, combustion timing and heat transfer to wall were increased significantly compared to those for a conventional engine, in anticipation of an expansion of the load range of premixed charge compression ignition (PCI) combustion to higher loads.

Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs) are undergoing a rapid development, due to the ever-growing interest towards their use to decarbonize power generation applications. In the transportation sector, a key technological challenge is their thermal management, i.e. the ability to preserve the membrane at the optimal thermal state to maximize the generated power. This corresponds to a narrow temperature range of 75-80°C, possibly uniformly distributed over the entire active surface. The achievement of such a requirement is complicated by the generation of thermal power, the limited exchange area for radiators, and the poor heat transfer performance of conventional coolants (e.g., ethylene glycol). The interconnection of thermal/fluid/electrochemical processes in PEMFCs renders heat rejection as a potential performance limiter, suggesting its maximization for power density increase.