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Knocking is one of today’s main limitations in the ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and reduce emissions of spark-ignition engines. Especially for synthetic fuels or any alternative fuel type in general with a much steeper increase of the knock frequency at the KLSA, such as hydrogen, precise knock prediction is crucial to exploit their full potential. This paper therefore proposes a post-processing tool enabling further investigations to continuously gain better understanding of the knocking phenomenon. In this context, evaluation of local auto-ignitions preceding knock is crucial to improve knowledge about the stochastic occurrence of knock but also identify critical engine design to further optimize the geometry. In contrast to 0D simulations, 3D CFD simulations provide the possibility to investigate local parameters in the cylinder during the combustion.

For the NOx removal from diesel exhaust, the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) and lean NOx traps are established technologies. However, these procedures lack efficiency below 200 °C, which is of importance for city driving and cold start phases. Thus, the present paper deals with the development of a novel low-temperature deNOx strategy implying the catalytic NOx reduction by hydrogen. For the investigations, a highly active H2-deNOx catalyst, originally engineered for lean H2 combustion engines, was employed. This Pt-based catalyst reached peak NOx conversion of 95 % in synthetic diesel exhaust with N2 selectivities up to 80 %. Additionally, driving cycle tests on a diesel engine test bench were also performed to evaluate the H2-deNOx performance under practical conditions. For this purpose, a diesel oxidation catalyst, a diesel particulate filter and a H2 injection nozzle with mixing unit were placed upstream to the full size H2-deNOx catalyst.

As engine knock limits the efficiency of spark ignition engines and consequently further reduction of CO2 emissions, SI engines are typically designed to operate at the knock boundary. Therefore, a precise knock model is necessary to consider this phenomenon in an engine process simulation. The basis of the introduced 0D/1D knock model is to predict when the unburnt mixture auto-ignites, since auto-ignitions precede knocking events. The knock model further needs to evaluate the auto-ignition, because not every auto-ignition results in engine knock. As the introduced model’s prediction of the auto-ignition onset is already validated at extensive variations of operating conditions, this publication focusses on its evaluation. For this, two new, independent criteria are developed that take the pre-reactions of the unburnt mixture before the start of combustion into account to calculate a respective threshold for the auto-ignition onset at the knock boundary.

Engine knock is limiting the efficiency of spark ignition engines and consequently further reduction of CO2 emissions. Thus, an combustion process simulation needs a well working knock model to take this phenomenon into account. As knocking events result from auto-ignitions, the basis of a knock model is the accurate modeling of the latter. For this, the introduced 0D/1D knock model calculates the Livengood-Wu integral to estimate the state of the pre-reactions of the unburnt mixture and considers the two-stage auto-ignition of gasoline fuels, which occurs at specific boundary conditions. The model presented in this publication is validated against measurement data of a single cylinder engine. For this purpose, more than 12 000 knocking working cycles are investigated, covering extensively varied operating conditions for a wide-ranging validation.

To meet the requirements of strict CO2 emission regulations in the future, internal combustion engines must have excellent efficiencies for a wide operating range. In order to achieve this goal, various technologies must be applied. Additionally, fuels other than gasoline should also be considered. In order to investigate the potential of the efficiency improvement, a SI engine was designed and optimized using 0D/1D methods. Some of the advanced features of this engine model include: High stroke-to-bore-ratio, variable valve timings with Miller cycle, EGR, cylinder deactivation, high turbulence concept, variable compression ratio and extreme downsizing. The fuel of choice was gasoline. With the proper application of technologies, the fuel consumption at the most relevant operating window could be decreased by approximately 10% in comparison to a state-of-the-art spark-ignited direct-injection four-cylinder passenger car engine.

This paper investigates the pressure drop with and without condensation inside a charge air cooler. The background to this investigation is the fact that the stored condensate in charge air coolers can be torn into the combustion chamber during different driving states. This may result in misfiring or in the worst-case lead to an engine failure. In order to prevent or reduce the accumulated condensate inside charge air coolers, a better understanding of the detailed physics of this process is required. To this end, one single channel of the charge air side is investigated in detail by using an experimental setup that was built to reproduce the operating conditions leading to condensation. First, measurements of the pressure drop without condensation are conducted and a good agreement with experimental data of a comparable heat exchanger reported in Kays and London [1] is shown.

Intensified emission regulations as well as consumption demands lead to an increasing significance of unburned hydrocarbon (UHC) emissions for diesel engines. On the one hand, the quantity of hydrocarbon (HC) raw emissions is important for emission predictions as well as for the exhaust after treatment. On the other hand, HC emissions are also important for predicting combustion efficiency and thus fuel consumption, since a part of unreleased chemical energy of the fuel is still bound in the HC molecules. Due to these reasons, a simulation model for predicting HC raw emissions was developed for diesel engines based on a phenomenological two-zone model. The HC model takes three main sources of HC emissions of diesel engines into account: Firstly, it contains a sub-model that describes the fuel dribble out of the injector after the end of injection. Secondly, HC emissions from cold peripheral zones near cylinder walls are determined in another sub-model.

Pilot injection gas engines are commonly used as large stationary engines. Often, the combustion is implemented as a dual-fuel strategy, which allows both mixed and diesel-only operation, based on a diesel engine architecture. The current research project focuses on the application of pilot injection in an engine based on gasoline components of the passenger car segment, which are more cost-effective than diesel components. The investigated strategy does not aim for a diesel-only combustion, hence only small liquid quantities are used for the main purpose of providing a strong, reliable ignition source for the natural gas charge. This approach is mainly driven to provide a reliable alternative to the high spark ignition energies required for high cylinder charge densities. When using such small liquid quantities, a standard common-rail diesel nozzle will apparently not be ideal regarding some general specifications.

Further improvements of internal combustion engines to reduce fuel consumption and to face future legislation constraints are strictly related to the study of mixture formation. The reason for that is the desire to supply the engine with homogeneous charge, towards the direction of a global stoichiometric blend in the combustion chamber. Fuel evaporation and thus mixture quality mostly depend on injector atomization features and charge motion within the cylinder. 3D-CFD simulations offer great potential to study not only injector atomization quality but also the evaporation behavior. Nevertheless coupling optical measurements and simulations for injector analysis is an open discussion because of the large number of influencing parameters and interactions affecting the fuel injection’s reproducibility. For this purpose, detailed numerical investigations are used to describe the injection phenomena.

The industry is working intensively on the precision of thermal management. By using complex thermal management strategies, it is possible to make engine heat distribution more accurate and dynamic, thereby increasing efficiency. Significant efforts are made to improve the cooling efficiency of the engine water jacket by using 3D CFD. As well, 1D simulation plays a significant role in the design and analysis of the cooling system, especially for considering transient behaviour of the engine. In this work, a practice-oriented universal method for creating a 1D water jacket model is presented. The focus is on the discretization strategy of 3D geometry and the calculation of heat transfer using Nusselt correlations. The basis and reference are 3D CFD simulations of the water jacket. Guidelines for the water jacket discretization are proposed. The heat transfer calculation in the 1D-templates is based on Nusselt-correlations (Nu = Nu(Re, Pr)), which are derived from 3D CFD simulations.

As a consequence of reduced fuel consumption, direct injection gasoline engines have already prevailed against port fuel injection. However, in-cylinder fuel homogenization strongly depends on charge motion and injection strategies and can be challenging due to the reduced available time for mixture formation. An insufficient homogenization has generally a negative impact on the combustion and therefore also on efficiency and emissions. In order to reach the targets of the intensified CO2 emission reduction, further increase in efficiency of SI engines is essential. In this connection, 0D/1D simulation is a fundamental tool due to its application area in an early stage of development and its relatively low computational costs. Certainly, inhomogeneities are still not considered in quasi dimensional combustion models because the prediction of mixture formation is not included in the state of the art 0D/1D simulation.

The reduction of engine-out emissions and increase of the total efficiency is a fundamental approach to reduce the fuel consumption and thus emissions of vehicles driven by combustion engines. Conventional passenger cars are operated mainly in lower part loads for most of their lifetime. Under these conditions, oil temperatures are far below the maximum temperature allowed and dominate inside the journal bearings. Therefore, the objective of this research was to investigate possible potentials of friction reduction by optimizing the combustion engine’s thermal management of the oil circuit. Within the engine investigations, it was shown that especially the friction of the main and connecting rod bearings could be reduced with an increase of the oil supply temperature. Furthermore, on a journal bearing test rig, it was shown that no excessive wear of the bearings is to be expected in case of load increase and simultaneous supply of cooler oil.

The real cycle simulation is an important tool to predict the engine efficiency. To evaluate Extended Expansion SI-engines with a multi-link cranktrain, the challenge is to consider all concept specific effects as best as possible by using appropriate submodels. Due to the multi-link cranktrain, the choice of a suitable heat transfer model is of great importance since the cranktrain kinematics is changed. Therefore, the usage of the mean piston speed to calculate a heat-transfer-related velocity for heat transfer equations is not sufficient. The heat transfer equation according to Bargende combines for its calculation the actual piston speed with a simplified k-ε model. In this paper it is assessed, whether the Bargende model is valid for Extended Expansion engines. Therefore a single-cylinder engine is equipped with fast-response surface-thermocouples in the cylinder head. The surface heat flux is calculated by solving the unsteady heat conduction equation.

As part of a system model, a PEM fuel cell stack model is presented for functional tests and pre-calibration of control units on hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test benches. From the basic idea to couple a 1-D membrane model with a spatially distributed abstraction of the gas channel, a real-time capable 1-D+1-D PEM FC stack model is constructed. Fundament for the HiL usage is an explicit formulation of the commonly implicit model equations. With that, not only calculation time can be reduced, but also model accuracy is preserved. A validation using test bench data emphasizes the accuracy of the model. Finally, a runtime and eigenvalue analysis of the stack model proves the real-time capability.

As known de-icing methods use a high amount of energy or environmentally harmful chemicals, research has focused lately on passive de-icing by functional surfaces with an improved removal of ice (de-icing) or a reduced formation of it (anti-icing). Inspired by the Lotus plant leaf, a “superhydrophobic” surface can be produced by the combination of a hierarchical micro/nanoscale roughness and a hydrophobic surface coating. By a hot stamping process we have generated differently shaped microstructures (cylinders, ellipses) on polyurethane (PU) films which were afterwards coated by a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) process with thin, hydrophobic fluorocarbon films. This combination of methods could be a process for the production of large area functionalized films. PU films are suitable for outdoor use, because they are resistant against erosion and UV radiation. The films can be glued to different geometries and can easily be exchanged if damaged.

More than 20 years after the first presentation of the heat transfer equation according to Bargende [1,2], it is time to introduce some useful additions and enhancements, with respect to new and advanced combustion principles like diesel- and gasoline- homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI). In the existing heat transfer equation according to Bargende the calculation of the actual combustion chamber surface area is formulated in accordance with the work of Hohenberg. Hohenberg found experimentally that in the piston top land only about 20-30% of the wall heat flux values from the combustion chamber are transferred to the liner and piston wall. Hohenberg explained this phenomenon that is caused by lower gas temperature and convection level in charge within the piston top land volume. The formulation just adds the existing piston top land surface area multiplied by a specified factor to the surface of the combustion chamber.

In this paper, a simulation approach is introduced which takes into account all relevant heat sources and sinks in the combustion engine and in the engine compartment. With this approach, it is possible to calculate the appearing power flow and enthalpy flow as well as the component temperatures. Therefore, the complex thermodynamic and friction processes in the engine are described as simple as possible; the complete system can still be described reliably within certain limits, and the effects of different thermal optimization measures can be shown. It is an essential point for the modeling that only two integral quantities are necessary (the high pressure efficiency and the high pressure wall heat loss) for the complete combustion model.

Improvement of heat-transfer calculation for SI-engines in the three-dimensional simulation has been achieved and widely been tested by using a phenomenological heat-transfer model. The model is based on the local application of an improved Re-Nu-correlation (dimensional analysis) proposed by Bargende [1]. This approach takes advantage of long experience in engine heat transfer modeling in the real working process analysis. The results of numerous simulations of different engine meshes show that the proposed heat-transfer model enables to calculate the overall as well as the local heat transfer in good agreement with both real working process analyses and experimental investigations. The influence of the mesh structure has also been remarkably reduced and compared to the standard wall function approach, no additional CPU-time is required.

Introducing a new fuel alternative to gasoline is a very complex task. According to their short to mid term economical feasibility selected processes are modeled. Selected emissions and the primary energy demand of the production and the utilization of hydrogen and methanol as fuels for fuel cell powered buses are compared to conventional diesel powered buses. Different production routes for the alternative fuels are considered. Ecological and economical numbers are given and interpreted.

For integrating Life Cycle Assessment into the design process it is more and more necessary to generate models of single life cycle steps respectively manufacturing processes. For that reason it is indispensable to develop parametric processes. With such disposed processes the aim could only be to provide a tool where parametric environmental process models are available for a designer. With such a tool and the included models a designer will have the possibility to make an estimation of the probable energy consumption and needed additive materials for the applied manufacturing technology. Likewise if he has from the technical point of view the opportunity, he can shift the applied joining technology in the design phase by changing for instance the design.