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Due to its high benefit-cost ratio, decreasing mechanical friction losses in internal combustion engines represents one of the most effective and widely applicable solutions for improved engine efficiency. Especially the piston group - consisting of piston, rings and pin - shows significant potential for friction reduction, which can be evaluated through extensive experimental parameter studies. For each investigated variant, the steady-state friction measurements are fitted to an empirical polynomial model. In order to calculate the associated fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in transient driving cycles, the steady-state friction model is used in a map-based vehicle simulation. If transient engine operation entails friction phenomena that are not included in the steady-state model, the simulation could yield erroneous fuel consumption and CO2 predictions.

The reduction of both harmful emissions (CO, HC, NOx, etc.) and gases responsible for greenhouse effects (especially CO2) are mandatory aspects to be considered in the development process of any kind of propulsion concept. Focusing on ICEs, the main development topics are today not only the reduction of harmful emissions, increase of thermodynamic efficiency, etc. but also the decarbonization of fuels which offers the highest potential for the reduction of CO2 emissions. Accordingly, the development of future ICEs will be closely linked to the development of CO2 neutral fuels (e.g. biofuels and e-fuels) as they will be part of a common development process. This implies an increase in development complexity, which needs the support of engine simulations. In this work, the virtual modeling of real fuel behavior is addressed to improve current simulation capabilities in studying how a specific composition can affect the engine performance.

CO2 emission constraints taking effect from 2020 lead to further investigations of technologies to lower knock sensitivity of gasoline engines, main limiting factor to increase engine efficiency and thus reduce fuel consumption. Moreover the RDE cycle demands for higher power operation, where fuel enrichment is needed for component protection. To achieve high efficiency, the engine should be run at stoichiometric conditions in order to have better emission control and reduce fuel consumption. Among others, water injection is a promising technology to improve engine combustion efficiency, by mainly reducing knock sensitivity and to keep high conversion rates of the TWC over the whole engine map. The comprehension of multiple thermodynamic effects of water injection through 3D-CFD simulations and their exploitation to enhance the engine combustion efficiency is the main purpose of the analysis.

Engine valve flow coefficients are used to describe the flow throughput performance of engine valve/port designs, and to model gas exchange in 0D/1D engine simulation. Valve flow coefficients are normally determined at a stationary flow test bench, separately for intake and exhaust side, in the absence of the piston. However, engine operation differs from this setup; i. a. the piston might interact with valve flow around scavenging top dead center, and instead of steady boundary conditions, valve flow is nearly always subjected to pressure pulsations, due to pressure wave reflections within the gas exchange ports. In this work the influences of piston position and flow pulsation on valve flow coefficients are investigated for different SI engine geometries by means of 3D CFD and measurements at an enhanced flow test bench.

Increasing the efficiency of modern gasoline engines (with direct injection and spark-ignition - DISI) requires innovative approaches. The reduction of the engine displacement, accompanied by an increase of the mean pressure, is limited by the tendency of increasing combustion anomalies. Conventional methods for knock mitigation, on the contrary, have a negative effect on consumption and efficiency. A promising technology to solve these conflicting objectives is the injection of water. Both the indirect and the direct water injection achieve a significant reduction in the load temperature. The fuel enrichment can be reduced, whereby the operating range of the exhaust aftertreatment can be extended. In addition, water injection paves the way for an increase in the geometric compression ratio, which leads to an efficiency advantage even at partial load.

Over the past years, the question as to what may be the powertrain of the future has become ever more apparent. Aiming to improve upon a given technology, the internal combustion engine still offers a number of development paths in order to maintain its position in public and private mobility. In this study, an innovative combustion process is investigated with the goal to further approximate the ideal Otto cycle. Thus far, similar approaches such as Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) shared the same objective yet were unable to be operated under high load conditions. Highly increased control efforts and excessive mechanical stress on the components are but a few examples of the drawbacks associated with HCCI. The approach employed in this work is the so-called Spark Assisted Compression Ignition (SACI) in combination with a pre-chamber spark plug, enabling short combustion durations even at high dilution levels.

Engine valve flow coefficients are not only used to characterize the performance of valve/port designs, but also for modelling gas exchange in 0D/1D engine simulation. Flow coefficients are usually estimated with small pressure ratios and at ambient air conditions. In contrast, the ranges for pressure ratio, pressure and temperature level during engine operation are much more extensive. In this work the influences of these three parameters on SI engine poppet valve flow coefficients are investigated using 3D CFD and measurements for validation. While former investigations already showed some pressure ratio dependencies by measurement, here the use of 3D CFD allows a more comprehensive analysis and a deeper understanding of the relevant effects. At first, typical ranges for the three mentioned parameters during engine operation are presented.

As the importance of sustainability increases and dominates the powertrain development within the automotive sector, this issue has to be addressed in motorsports as well. The development of sustainable high-performance fuels defined for the use in motorsports offers technical and environmental potential with the possibility to increase the sustainability of motorsports at the same or even a better performance level. At the moment race cars are predominantly powered by fossil fuels. However due to the emerging shift regarding the focus of the regulations towards high efficient powertrains during the last years the further development of the used fuels gained in importance. Moreover during the last decades a huge variety of sustainable fuels emerged that offer a range of different characteristics and that are produced based on waste materials or carbon dioxide.

As a promising solution to improve fuel efficiency of a long-haul heavy duty truck with diesel engine, organic Rankine cycle (ORC) based waste heat recovery system (WHR) by utilizing the exhaust gas from internal combustion engine has continuously drawn attention from automobile industry in recent years. The most attractive concept of ORC-based WHR system is the conversion of the thermal energy of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and exhaust gas from Tailpipe (EGT) to kinetic energy which is provided to the engine crankshaft. Due to a shift of the operating point of the engine by applying WHR system, the efficiency of the overall system increases and the fuel consumption reduces respectively. However, the integration of WHR system in truck is challenging by using engine cooling system as heat sink for Rankine cycle. The coolant mass flow rate influences strongly on the exhaust gas bypass which ensures a defined subcooling after condenser to avoid cavitation of pump.

The heat transfer process in a reciprocating engine is dominated by forced convection, which is drastically affected by mean flow, turbulence, flame propagation and its impingement on the combustion chamber walls. All these effects contribute to a transient heat flux, resulting in a fast-changing temporal and spatial temperature distribution at the surface of the combustion chamber walls. To quantify these changes in combustion chamber surface temperature, surface temperature measurements on the piston of a single cylinder diesel engine were taken. Therefore, thirteen fast-response thermocouples were installed in the piston surface. A wireless microwave telemetry system was used for data transmission out of the moving piston. A wide range of parameter studies were performed to determine the varying influences on the surface temperature of the piston.

The engine development process has been enhanced significantly by virtual engineering methods during the last decades. In terms of in-cylinder flow field, charge flow and combustion modelling, 3D-CFD (three dimensional) simulations enable detailed analysis and extended investigations in order to gain additional knowledge about design parameters. However, the computational time of the 3D-CFD is an obvious drawback that prevents a reasonable application for extensive analysis with varying speed, load and transient conditions. State-of-the-art 0D (zero dimensional) approaches close the gap between the demand of high computational efficiency and a satisfying accordance with experimental data. Recent improvements of phenomenological combustion approaches for gasoline spark ignition engines deal with the consideration of detailed flow parameters, the accuracy of the laminar flame speed calculation and the prediction of the knock limit.

Variation of the geometric compression ratio in gasoline combustion engines during engine operation enables potential for decreasing fuel consumption as well as emissions. One way to achieve a variable geometric compression ratio (VCR) is the application of a connecting rod with a variable effective length between its large end and its small end. Such a system consists of a connecting rod body with an eccentrically supported piston pin and a linkage which is supported hydraulically. Therefore, the connecting rod evolves from a solid part to a complex assembly of mechanical and hydraulic parts. In order to deploy this system in the most efficient way, an understanding of the physics and the dynamic behavior of the VCR connecting rod is necessary. This includes the mechanical subsystem as well as the hydraulic subsystem. This paper describes the experimental examination of a two stage variable connecting rod.

The simulation of transient engine behavior has gained importance mainly due to stringent emission limits, measured under real driving conditions and the concurrently demanded vehicle performance. This is especially true for turbocharged engines, as the coupling of the combustion engine and the turbocharger forms a complex system in which the components influence each other remarkably causing, for example, the well-known turbo lag. Because of this strong interaction, during a transient load case, the components should not be analyzed separately since they mutually determine their boundary conditions. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (3D-CFD) simulations of full engines in stationary operating points have become practicable several years ago and will remain a valuable tool in virtual engine development; however, the next logical step is to extend this approach into the transient domain.

With the increasingly strict emission regulations and economic demands, variable valve trains are gaining in importance in Diesel engines. A valve control strategy has a great impact on the in-cylinder charge motions, turbulence level, thus also on the combustion and emission formation. In order to predict in-cylinder charge motions and turbulence properties for a working process calculation, a zero−/quasi-dimensional flow model is developed for the Diesel engines with a fully variable valve train. For the purpose of better understanding the in-cylinder flow phenomena, detailed 3D CFD simulations of intake and compression strokes are performed at different operating conditions with various piston configurations. In the course of model development, global in-cylinder charge motions are assigned to idealized flow fields. Among them, swirl flow is characterized by an engine swirl number that is determined by both developments of the swirl angular momentum and the moment of inertia.

Minimizing the lap time for a given race track is the main target in racecar development. In order to achieve the highest possible performance of the vehicle configuration the mutual interaction at the level of assemblies and components requires a balance between the advantages and disadvantages for each design decision. Especially the major shift in the focus of racecar powerunit development to high efficiency powertrains is driving a development of lean boosted and rightsized engines. In terms of dynamic engine behavior the time delay from requested to provided torque could influence the lap time performance. Therefore, solely maximizing the full load behavior objective is insufficient to achieve minimal lap time. By means of continuous predictive virtual methods throughout the whole development process, the influence on lap time by dynamic power lags, e.g. caused by the boost system, can be recognized efficiently even in the early concept phase.

At specific operating conditions, the auto-ignition in the unburnt mixture that precedes the occurrence of knock in conventional SI engines happens in two stages. In a previous publication, the authors demonstrated that the low-temperature heat release significantly influences the auto-ignition behavior of the mixture, thus severely impairing the prediction capabilities of the Livengood-Wu integral that the majority of the commonly used 0D/1D knock models are based on. Consequently, a new two-stage auto-ignition prediction approach for modeling the progress of the chemical reactions was introduced. It was demonstrated that the proposed auto-ignition model predicts the occurrence of two-stage ignition and accurately considers the significant influence of low-temperature heat release on the mixture’s auto-ignition behavior at various operating conditions.

In the quasi-dimensional modeling of the spark-ignition combustion process, the burn rate calculation depends, among other influences, on the laminar flame speed. Commonly used models of laminar flame speeds are usually developed on the basis of measurement data limited to boundary conditions outside of the engine operation range. This limitation is caused by flame instabilities and forces flame speed models to be extrapolated for the application in combustion process simulation. However, for the investigation of, for example, lean burn engine concepts, reliable flame speed values are needed to improve the quality and predictive ability of burn rate models. For this purpose, a reference fuel for gasoline is defined to perform reaction kinetics calculations of laminar flame speeds for a wide range of boundary conditions.

Fulfilling exhaust emissions regulations and meet customer performance needs mainly drive the current engine development. Turbocharging system plays a key role for that. Currently turbocharging should provide highest engine power density at high engine speed by also allowing a very responsive performance at low end. This represents a trade-off in turbocharger development. A large scaled turbine allows having moderate exhaust gas back pressure for peak power region, but leading to loss of torque in low engine speed. In the last years of engine development scavenging helped to get away a bit from this trade-off as it increases the turbine mass flow and also reduces cylinder internal residual gas at low engine speed. The mostly in-use lean strategy runs air fuel ratios of closed to stoichiometric mixture in cylinder and global (pre catalyst) of λ = 1.05 to l = 1.3. This will be out of the narrow air fuel ratio band of λ = 1 to ensure NOx conversion in the 3-way-catalyst.

As a promising concept to improve fuel efficiency of a long-haul heavy duty truck with diesel engine, organic Rankine cycle (ORC) based waste heat recovery system (WHR) by utilizing the exhaust gas from internal combustion engine has continuously drawn attention from industry in recent years. The greatest achievable global efficiency may be, however, restricted by the engine. On one hand, engine operating conditions have direct impact on the temperature and the mass flow of exhaust gas, which is the waste heat source, on the other hand, the engine cooling system limits the heat rejection from the condenser of the WHR system. This paper aims to evaluate the impacts of the varied engine applications considering the effects of the WHR system on the global efficiency and engine emissions.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is developing a free-piston engine as an innovative internal combustion engine for the generation of electrical power. The arrangement of the Free Piston Linear Generator (FPLG) in opposed-piston design consists of two piston units oscillating freely, thereby alternately compressing the common combustion chamber in the center of the unit and gas springs on either side. Linear alternators convert the kinetic energy of the moving pistons into electric energy. Since the pistons are not mechanically coupled to a crank train, the bottom and top dead centers of the piston movement can be varied during operation e.g. to adjust the compression ratio. Utilizing these degrees of freedom, the present paper deals with the analysis of different combustion processes in a port scavenged opposed-piston combustion chamber prototype.