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Powertrain and vehicle technology is rapidly changing to meet the ever increasing demands of customers and government regulations. In some cases technologies that are designed to improve one attribute may impact others or interact with other design decisions in unexpected ways. Understanding the interactions and optimizing the transient performance at the vehicle level may require controls and calibration that is not available until late in the vehicle development process, after hardware changes are no longer possible. As a result, an efficient, up front, CAE process for assessing the interaction of various design choices on transient vehicle behavior is desirable. Building, calibrating and validating a vehicle system model with full controls and a mature calibration is very time consuming and often requires significant experimental data that is not available until it is too late to make hardware changes.

For diesel engines to meet current and future emissions levels, the amount of EGR required to reach these levels has increased dramatically. This increased EGR has posed big challenges for conventional turbocharger technology to meet the higher emissions requirements while maintaining or improving other vehicle attributes, to the extent that some OEMs resort to multiple turbocharger configurations. These configurations can include parallel, series sequential, or parallel - series turbocharger systems, which would inevitably run into other issues, such as cost, packaging, and thermal loss, etc. This study, as part of a U.S. Department of Energy (USDoE) sponsored research program, is focused on the experimental evaluation of the emission and performance of a modern diesel engine with an advanced single stage turbocharger.

The use of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) in internal combustion engines has significant impacts on combustion and emissions. EGR can be used to reduce in-cylinder NOx production, reduce emitted particulate matter, and enable advanced forms of combustion. To maximize the benefits of EGR, the exhaust gases are often cooled with on-engine liquid to gas heat exchangers. A common problem with this approach is the build-up of a fouling layer inside the heat exchanger due to thermophoresis and condensation, reducing the effectiveness of the heat exchanger in lowering gas temperatures. Literature has shown the effectiveness to initially drop rapidly and then approach steady state after a variable amount of time. The asymptotic behavior of the effectiveness has not been well explained. A range of theories have been proposed including fouling layer removal, changing fouling layer properties, and cessation of thermophoresis.

Combustion engines are typically only 20-30% efficient at part-load operating conditions, resulting in poor fuel economy on average. To address this, LiquidPiston has developed an improved thermodynamics cycle, called the High-Efficiency Hybrid Cycle (HEHC), which optimizes each process (stroke) of the engine operation, with the aim of maximizing fuel efficiency. The cycle consists of: 1) a high compression ratio; 2) constant-volume combustion, and 3) over-expansion. At a modest compression ratio of 18:1, this cycle offers an ideal thermodynamic efficiency of 74%. To embody the HEHC cycle, LiquidPiston has developed two very different rotary engine architectures ? called the ?M? and ?X? engines. These rotary engine architectures offer flexibility in executing the thermodynamics cycle, and also result in a very compact package. In this talk, I will present recent results in the development of the LiquidPiston engines. The company is currently testing 20 and 40 HP versions of the ?M?

Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) coolers are commonly used in diesel engines to reduce the temperature of recirculated exhaust gases in order to reduce NOX emissions. Engine coolant is used to cool EGR coolers. The presence of a cold surface in the cooler causes fouling due to particulate soot deposition, condensation of hydrocarbon, water and acid. Fouling experience results in cooler effectiveness loss and pressure drop. In this study, possible soot deposition mechanisms are discussed and their orders of magnitude are compared. Also, probable removal mechanisms of soot particles are studied by calculating the forces acting on a single particle attached to the wall or deposited layer. Our analysis shows that thermophoresis in the dominant mechanism for soot deposition in EGR coolers and high surface temperature and high kinetic energy of soot particles at the gas-deposit interface can be the critical factor in particles removal.

EGR coolers are effective to reduce NOx emissions from diesel engines due to lower intake charge temperature. EGR cooler fouling reduces heat transfer capacity of the cooler significantly and increases pressure drop across the cooler. Engine coolant provided at 40–90 C is used to cool EGR coolers. The presence of a cold surface in the cooler causes particulate soot deposition and hydrocarbon condensation. The experimental data also indicates that the fouling is mainly caused by soot and hydrocarbons. In this study, a 1-D model is extended to simulate particulate soot and hydrocarbon deposition on a concentric tube EGR cooler with a constant wall temperature. The soot deposition caused by thermophoresis phenomena is taken into account the model. Condensation of a wide range of hydrocarbon molecules are also modeled but the results show condensation of only heavy molecules at coolant temperature.

Optimization of the engine cold start is critical for gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines to meet increasingly stringent emission regulations, since the emissions during the first 20 seconds of the cold start constitute more than 80% of the hydrocarbon (HC) emissions for the entire EPA FTP75 drive cycle. However, Direct Injection Spark Ignition (DISI) engine cold start optimization is very challenging due to the rapidly changing engine speed, cold thermal environment and low cranking fuel pressure. One approach to reduce HC emissions for DISI engines is to adopt retarded spark so that engines generate high heat fluxes for faster catalyst light-off during the cold idle. This approach typically degrades the engine combustion stability and presents additional challenges to the engine cold start. This paper describes a CFD modeling based approach to address these challenges for the Ford 3.5L V6 EcoBoost engine cold start.

EGR coolers are mainly used on diesel engines to reduce intake charge temperature and thus reduce emissions of NOx and PM. Soot and hydrocarbon deposition in the EGR cooler reduces heat transfer efficiency of the cooler and increases emissions and pressure drop across the cooler. They may also be acidic and corrosive. Fouling has been always treated as an approximate factor in heat exchanger designs and it has not been modeled in detail. The aim of this paper is to look into fouling formation in an EGR cooler of a diesel engine. A 1-D model is developed to predict and calculate EGR cooler fouling amount and distribution across a concentric tube heat exchanger with a constant wall temperature. The model is compared to an experiment that is designed for correlation of the model. Effectiveness, mass deposition, and pressure drop are the parameters that have been compared. The results of the model are in a good agreement with the experimental data.

Spray angle and penetration length data were taken under cold start conditions for a Direct Injection Spark Ignition engine to investigate the effect of transient conditions on spray development. The results show that during cold start, spray development depends primarily on fuel pressure, followed by Manifold Absolute Pressure (MAP). Injection frequency had little effect on spray development. The spray for this single hole, pressure-swirl fuel injector was characterized using high speed imaging. The fuel spray was characterized by three different regimes. Regime 1 comprised fuel pressures from 6 - 13 bar, MAPs from 0.7 - 1 bar, and was characterized by a large pre-spray along with large drop sizes. The spray angle and penetration lengths were comparatively small. Regime 2 comprised fuel pressures from 30 - 39 bar and MAPs from 0.51 - 0.54 bar. A large pre-spray and large drop sizes were still present but reduced compared to Regime 1.

Droplet size and velocity measurements were taken under cold start conditions for a Direct Injection Spark Ignition engine to investigate the effect of transient conditions on spray development. The results show that during cold start, spray development depends primarily on fuel pressure, followed by Manifold Absolute Pressure (MAP). The spray for this single hole, pressure-swirl fuel injector was characterized using phase Doppler interferometry. The fuel spray was characterized by three different regimes. Regime 1 comprised fuel pressures from 6 - 13 bar, MAPs from 0.7 - 1 bar, and was characterized by a large pre-spray along with large drop sizes. The spray profile resembled a solid cone. Regime 2 comprised fuel pressures from 30 - 39 bar and MAPs from 0.51 - 0.54 bar. A large pre-spray and large drop sizes were still present but reduced compared to Regime 1. The spray profile was mostly solid. Regime 3 comprised fuel pressures from 65 - 102 bar and MAPs from 0.36 - 0.46 bar.

Advancing intake valve timing shortly after engine crank and run-up can potentially reduce vehicle cold start hydrocarbon (HC) emissions in port fuel injected (PFI) engines equipped with intake variable cam timing (iVCT). Due to the cold metal temperatures, there can be significant accumulation of liquid fuel in the intake system and in the cylinder. This accumulation of liquid fuel provides potential sources for unburned hydrocarbons (HCs). Since the entire vehicle exhaust system is cold, the catalyst will not mitigate the release of unburned HCs. By advancing the intake valve timing and increasing valve overlap, liquid fuel vaporization in the intake system is enhanced thereby increasing the amount of burnable fuel in the cylinder. This increase in burnable HCs must be countered by a reduction in injector-delivered fuel via a compensator that reacts to cam movement.

The physics of the mixture preparation process plays a critical role in transient engine control, a key enabler for satisfying increasingly stringent emissions requirements. This paper presents a fully transient, coupled model in Modelica for the liquid fuel behavior and thermodynamic engine cycle including thermal effects for a port fuel injection engine. Details of both the liquid fuel transport and cycle simulation models are provided. The integrated model is used to examine the effects of variable cam timing on the transient fuel behavior including comparisons between simulation results and experimental data under a variety of engine operating conditions.

Ethanol is one of many alternative transportation fuels that can be burned in internal combustion engines in the same ways as gasoline and diesel. Compared to hydrogen and electric energy, ethanol is very similar to gasoline in many aspects and can be delivered to end-users by the same infrastructures. It can be produced from biomass and is considered renewable. It is expected that the improvement in fuels over the next 20 years will be by blending biomass-based fuels with fossil fuels using existing technologies in present-day automobiles with only minor modifications, even though the overall costs of using biomass-based fuels are still considerably higher than conventional fuels. Ethanol may represent a significant alternative fuel source, especially during the transition from fossil-based fuels to more exotic power sources. Mapping engines for flexible fuel vehicles (FFV), however, would be very costly and time consuming, even with the help of model-based engine mapping (MBM).

The occurrence of flash boiling in the fuel spray of a Port Fuel Injected (PFI) spark ignition engine has been observed and photographed during normal automotive vehicle operating conditions. The flash boiling of the PFI spray has a dramatic affect on the fuel spray characteristics such as droplet size and spray cone angle which can affect engine transient response, intake valve temperature and possibly hydrocarbon emissions. A new method of correlating the spray behavior using the equilibrium vapor/liquid (V/L) volume ratio of the fuel at the measured fuel temperature and manifold pressure is introduced.