Search Results

Liquid ammonia is an ideal zero carbon fuel to reduce carbon emission of internal combustion engines. The high-pressure injection of liquid ammonia is a key technology to fast distribute fuels and prepare better combustion performances. The physical properties of liquid ammonia are different to traditional fossil fuels including diesel and gasoline, which can change the spray and droplet characteristics significantly. However, the spray droplet characteristics of liquid ammonia injection is lack of investigations. In this paper, Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) are used to measure the droplet diameter and velocity of high-pressure liquid ammonia sprays up to 75 MPa and compare to diesel sprays. Effects of flash boiling of liquid ammonia droplet characteristics are also analyzed.

In this decade, the detailed multi-layer FE model is always applied for investigating the mechanical behavior of Li-ion batteries under mechanical abuse. However, establishing a detailed model of different types of batteries requires a series of material characterization of components. To improve the efficiency of the procedure of component calibration, we introduce a procedure of automatic coating material characterization as an example to represent the strategy. The proposed method is constructing a response solver through MATLAB to predict the mechanical behavior of the coating specimen's representative volume element (RVE) under designated test conditions. The coating material is represented through Drucker-Prager-Cap (DPC) model. All parameters, including boundary conditions and material parameters, are included in this solver.

Octane number (ON) and octane sensitivity (S), the fuel anti-knock indices, are critical for the design of advanced jet ignition engines. In this study, ten fuels with different research octane number (RON) and varying S were formulated based on ethanol reference fuels (ERFs) to investigate the effect of S on combustion of jet ignition engine. To fully understand S effects, the combustion characteristics under EGR dilution and lean burn were further investigated. The results indicated that increasing S resulted in higher reactivity with shorter ignition delay and combustion duration. The increase of reactivity led to heavier knocking intensity. The competition between the flame speed and the reactivity of the mixture determined the auto-ignition fraction of mixture and the knocking onset crank angle as S varied. Medium S (S=3) was helpful to improve the combustion speed, reduce the auto-ignition fraction of mixture and retard the knocking onset crank angle.

The combustion characteristics and soot emissions of three types of fuels were studied in a high pressure and temperature vessel. In order to achieve better volatility, proper cetane number and high oxygen content, the newly designed WDEP fuel was proposed and investigated. It is composed of wide distillation fuel (WD), PODE3-6 mixture (PODEn) and ethanol. For comparison, the test on WD and the mixture of PODEn-ethanol (EP) are also conducted. OH* chemiluminescence during the combustion was measured and instantaneous PLII was also applied to reveal the soot distribution. Abel transformation was adopted to calculate the total soot of axisymmetric flame. The results show that WDEP has similar ignition delays and flame lift-off lengths to those of WD at 870-920 K. But the initial ignition locations of WDEP flame in different cycles were more concentrated, particularly under the condition of low oxygen atmosphere.

A hydraulic chamber is embedded in serial with the accumulator of a normal mono-tube magnetorheological fluid damper (MRFD). The damper stiffness can be adjusted by changing the accumulator volume with the hydraulic chamber. The hydraulic chamber is connected to an electric pump and controlled by the braking-by-wire (BBW) system. A modified bi-viscosity magnetorheological fluid (MRF) model that explicitly includes the parameter of control current is proposed. A dynamic model of this hydraulic MRFD is subsequently set up based on the MRF model. Experiments are conducted to validate the model and simulations are carried out to study the influences of accumulator volume on the external performances. Results show that the hydraulic chamber is able to provide rapid variations of the external force through accumulator volume changes.

In recent years, structural adhesives have rapidly become the preferred alternative to resistance spot welding in fabricating stronger, lighter aluminum connections. Connections inevitably undergo and must withstand complex quasi-static and/or dynamic loads during their service life. Therefore, understanding how loading conditions affect the mechanical behavior of adhesive joints is vital to their design and the advancement of structural safety. Quasi-static and dynamic tests are performed to analyze both the strength and failure modes of aluminum 6062 substrates bonded by an adhesive (Darbond EP-1506) for an array of loading directions. An Arcan test device, which enables application of mixed-mode loads ranging from pure peel (mode I) to pure shear (mode II) to the adhesive layer, is employed in quasi-static testing. A self-designed medium-speed test machine is utilized to perform dynamic testing.

Metal foil is a widely used material in the automobile industry, which not only is the honeycomb barrier material but is also used as current collectors in Li-ion batteries. Plenty of studies proved that the mechanical property of the metal foil is quite different from that of the metal sheet because of the size effect on microscopic scale, as the metal foil shows a larger fracture stress and a lower ductility than the metal sheet. Meanwhile, the fracture behavior and accurate constitutive model of the metal foil with the consideration of the strain rate effect are widely concerned in further studies of battery safety and the honeycomb. This article conducted experiments on 8011H18 aluminum foil, aiming to explore the quasi-static and dynamic tension testing method and the anisotropic mechanical behavior of the very thin foil. Two metal foil dog-bone specimens and three types of notched specimens were tested with a strain rate ranging from 2 × 10−4/s to 40/s and various stress states.

Ground impact caused by road debris can result in very severe fire accident of Electric Vehicles (EV). In order to study the ground impact accidents, a Finite Element model of the battery pack structure is carefully set up according to the practical designs of EVs. Based on this model, the sequence of the deformation process is studied, and the contribution of each component is clarified. Subsequently, four designs, including three enhanced shield plates and one enhanced housing box, are investigated. Results show that the BRAS (Blast Resistant Adaptive Sandwich) shield plate is the most effective structure to decrease the deformation of the battery cells. Compared with the baseline case, which adopts a 6.35-mm-thick aluminum sheet as the shield plate, the BRAS can reduce the shortening of cells by more than 50%. Another type of sandwich structure, the NavTruss, can also improve the safety of battery pack, but not as effectively as the BRAS.

Polyoxymethylene Dimethyl Ether (PODEn) is a promising green additive to diesel fuel, owing to the unique chemical structure (CH3O[CH2O]nCH3, n≥2) and high cetane number. Together with the general wide-distillation fuel (WDF), which has an attractive potential to reduce the cost of production of vehicle fuel, the oxygenated WDF with PODEn can help achieve a high efficiency and low emissions of soot, NOx, HC, and CO simultaneously. In this paper, the first detailed reaction mechanism (225 species, 1082 reactions) which can describe the ignition characteristics of PODE1 and PODE3 at low temperature was developed.

Road test simulation on test rig is widely used in the automobile industry to shorten the development circles. However, there is still room for further improving the time cost of current road simulation test. This paper described a new method considering both the damage error and the runtime of the test on a multi-axial test rig. First, the fatigue editing technique is applied to cut the small load in road data to reduce the runtime initially. The edited road load data could be reproduced on a multi-axial test rig successfully. Second, the rainflow matrices of strains on different proving ground roads are established and transformed into damage matrices based on the S-N curve and Miner rules using a reduction method. A standard simulation test for vehicle reliability procedure is established according to the proving ground schedule as a target to be accelerated.

Engine torque fluctuation is a great threat to vehicle comfort and durability. Former researches tried to solve this problem by introducing active damping system, which means the motor is controlled to produce torque ripple with just the opposite phase to that of the engine. By this means, the torque fluctuation produced by the motor and the engine can be reduced. In this paper, a new method is raised. An attempt is proposed by changing the traditional structure of the motor, making it produce ripple torque by itself instead of controlling the motor. In this way a special used ISG (Integrated Starter Generator) motor for HEV (Hybrid Electrical Vehicles) is made to achieve active damping. In order to study the possibility, a simulation, which focus on the motor instead of the whole system, is developed and series-parallel configuration is used in this simulation. As for the motor that used in this paper, four kinds of motors have been investigated and compared.

A conceptual approach to help understand and simulate droplet induced pre-ignition is presented. The complex phenomenon of oil-fuel droplet induced pre-ignition has been decomposed to its elementary processes. This approach helps identify the key fluid properties and engine parameters that affect the pre-ignition phenomenon, and could be used to control LSPI. Based on the conceptual model, a 3D CFD engine simulation has been developed which is able to realistically model all of the elementary processes involved in droplet induced pre-ignition. The simulation was successfully able to predict droplet induced pre-ignition at conditions where the phenomenon has been experimentally observed. The simulation has been able to help explain the observation of pre-ignition advancement relative to injection timing as experimentally observed in a previous study [6].

As mechanical damage induced thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries has become one of the research hotspots, it is quite crucial to understand the mechanical behavior of component materials of lithium battery. This study focuses on the mechanical performance of separators and electrodes under different loading conditions and the error sources analysis for test results. Uniaxial tensile tests were conducted under both quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions. The strain was acquired through the combination of high speed camera and digital image correlation (DIC) method while the force was obtained with a customized load cell. Noticeable anisotropy and strain rate effect were observed for separators. The fracture mode of separators is highly correlated to the microscopic fiber orientation. To demonstrate the correlation microscopic images of separator material were obtained through SEM to match the facture edges of tensile tests at different loading directions.

This article is concerned with identification of true stress-strain curve under biaxial tension of thermoplastic polymers. A new type of biaxial tension attachment was embedded first in a universal material test machine, which is able to transform unidirectional loading of the test machine to biaxial loading on the specimen with constant velocity. Cruciform specimen geometry was optimized via FE modeling. Three methods of calculating true stress in biaxial tension tests were compared, based on incompressibility assumption, linear elastic theory and inverse engineering method, respectively. The inverse engineering method is more appropriate for thermoplastic polymers since it considers the practical volume change of the material during biaxial tension deformation. The strategy of data processing was established to obtain biaxial tension true stress-strain curves of different thermoplastic polymers.

The mechanical behavior of polyvinyl butyral (PVB) film plays an important role in windshield crashworthiness and pedestrian protection and should be depth study. In this article, the uniaxial tension tests of PVB film at various strain rates (0.001 s-1, 0.01 s-1, 0.1 s-1, 1 s-1) and temperatures (-10°C, 0°C, 10°C, 23°C, 40°C, 55°C, 70°C) are conducted to investigate its mechanical behavior. Then, temperature and strain rate dependent viscoelastic characteristics of PVB are systematically studied. The results show that PVB is a kind of temperature and strain rate sensitive thermal viscoelastic material. Temperature increase and strain rate decrease have the same influence on mechanical properties of PVB. Besides, the mechanical characteristics of PVB change non-linearly with temperature and strain rate. Finally, two thermal viscoelastic constitutive model (ZWT model and DSGZ model) are suggested to describe the tension behavior of PVB film at various strain rates and temperatures.

Homogeneous Charge Induced Ignition (HCII) combustion utilizes a port injection of high-volatile fuel to form a homogeneous charge and a direct injection of high ignitable fuel near the Top Dead Center (TDC) to trigger combustion. Compared to Conventional Diesel Combustion (CDC) with high injection pressures, HCII has the potential to achieve diesel-like thermal efficiency with significant reductions in NOx and PM emissions with relatively low-pressure injections, which would benefit the engine cost saving remarkably. In the first part of current investigation, experiments were conducted at medium load with single diesel injection strategy. HCII exhibited great potential of using low injection pressures to achieve low soot emissions. But the engine load for HCII was limited by high heat release rate. Thus, in the second and third part, experiments were performed at high and low load with double diesel injection strategy.

The spray characteristics is the key to achieve the clean combustion in diesel engines and the in-cylinder conditions are one of the factors affecting the spray process. In this work, the diesel spray characteristics were studied over a range of injection pressures and ambient pressures in a constant volume chamber and a single-hole common rail diesel injector was used. The present work is to decouple the effects of ambient pressure and ambient density on near-field spray processes by using different ambient gas (N2, and CO2). The spray processes were captured by a Photron SA X2 camera with speed of 300,000 fps and resolution of 256 by 80 pixels. The spray processes were analyzed in terms of penetration length and spray tip velocity. Difference in penetration length and tip velocity were found at the same ambient density and/or ambient pressure when different ambient gases were used.

Gasoline Compression Ignition has been widely studied in recent years. The in-cylinder stratified charge in gasoline Partially Premixed Compression Ignition (PPCI) can extend the high load range with lower pressure rise rate than Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI). However, it is still not clear that whether there is flame propagation in the gasoline compression igntion mode and how the flame propagation influences the combustion process and pollution formation. In order to investigate the effect of flame, several gasoline compression ignition cases, including the single-stage and two-stage heat release processes, are simulated with the KIVA-3V Release 2 code in this study. The G-equation is employed to account for flame propagation, and the reduced i-octane/n-heptane mechanism is used to handle the chemical reactions. The results show that the flame propagation exists in the combustion process and it can accelerate the heat release slightly.

This study investigates the performance of a diesel engine fueled with naphtha under different load by varying injection parameters and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rate. The experiments were conducted on a 1.9-liter common rail diesel engine with a compression ratio of 17.5. Naphtha with a research octane number of 60.5 was tested. Three multi-injection strategies were designed. Each injection strategy, aided with EGR, conducts a characteristic combustion mode. Multi-injection strategies and single-injection strategy were tested and compared at one operating point under different main injection timing and EGR conditions. Results indicate that the well-designed multi-injection strategy has advantages over the single injection strategy in lowering noise, emissions and improving combustion efficiency. Among the three strategies, the strategy with 15-degree pilot timing and 2mg/cycle pilot injection could achieve both low NOx and PM emissions without sacrificing much fuel efficiency.

Detailed chemical kinetics is essential for accurate prediction of combustion performance as well as emissions in practical combustion engines. However, implementation of that is challenging. In this work, dynamic adaptive chemistry (DAC) is integrated into large eddy simulations (LES) of an n-heptane spray flame in a constant volume chamber (CVC) with realistic application conditions. DAC accelerates the time integration of the governing ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for chemical kinetics through the use of locally (spatially and temporally) valid skeletal mechanisms. Instantaneous flame structures and global combustion characteristics such as ignition delay time, flame lift-off length (LOL) and emissions are investigated to assess the effect of DAC on LES-DAC results. The study reveals that in LES-DAC simulations, the auto-ignition time and LOL obtain a well agreement with experiment data under different oxygen concentrations.