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High altitude ice crystals have led to instances of ice accretion on stationary compressor surfaces in aeroengines. Rollback, surge and stall events are known to have been instigated through such accretions due to aerodynamic losses related to ice growth, damage and flameout due to ice shedding. The prevalence of these events has led to a change in certification requirements for icing conditions. Development of accurate numerical models allows the costs of certification and testing to be minimised. An in-house computational code was developed at the Oxford Thermofluids Institute to model glaciated and mixed-phase ice crystal icing. The Ice Crystal Icing ComputationaL Environment (ICICLE) code, comprises a frozen 2D flowfield solution, Lagrangian particle tracking, particle heat transfer and phase change and particle surface interaction modelling.

Particulate emissions from gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines continue to be a topic of substantial research interest. Forthcoming regulation both in the USA and the EU will further reduce their emission and drive innovation. Substantial research effort is spent undertaking experiments to understand, characterize, and research particle number (PN) emissions from engines and vehicles. Recent advances in computing power, data storage, and understanding of artificial intelligence algorithms now mean that these are becoming an important tool in engine research. In this work a random forest (RF) algorithm is used for the prediction of PN emissions from a highly boosted (up to 32 bar BMEP) GDI engine. Particle size, concentration, and the accumulation mode geometric standard deviation (GSD) are all predicted by the model. The results are analysed and an in depth study on parameter importance is carried out.

Accurate modelling for spray vapour fields is critical to enable adequate predictions of spray ignition and combustion characteristics of non-premixed reacting diesel sprays. Spray vapour characteristics are in turn controlled by liquid atomization and the KH-RT liquid jet break-up model is regularly used to predict this: with the KH model used for predicting primary break-up given its definition as a surface wave growth model, and the RT model used for predicting secondary break-up due to it being a drag based, stripping model. This paper investigates how the alteration of the switching position of the KH and RT sub-models within the KH-RT model impacts the resulting vapour field and ignition characteristics. The combustion prediction is handled by the implementation of a 54 species, 269 reaction skeletal mechanism utilising a Well Stirred Reactor model within the Star-CD CFD code.

The flows in-cylinder have a profound effect on the mixture preparation and subsequent combustion in all engines. These flows are highly three-dimensional in nature and information from multiple planes is required to characterise the flow dynamics. The flow measurements reported here are from three orthogonal planes in an optical access engine that is based on the Jaguar Land Rover AJ200 Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engine. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurements have been taken every 5°CA from the start of induction to the end of compression. Data have been obtained from 300 cycles for separate experiments measuring flows in the tumble plane, the swirl plane and the cross-tumble plane. Vector comparison metrics are used to quantitatively compare ensemble averaged PIV flow fields to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations across each plane in terms of both the velocity magnitude and direction.

This study looked into the application of active thermal coatings on the surfaces of the combustion chamber as a method of improving the thermal efficiency of internal combustion engines. The active thermal coating was applied to a production aluminium piston and its performance was compared against a reference aluminium piston on a single-cylinder diesel engine. The two pistons were tested over a wide range of speed/load conditions and the effects of EGR and combustion phasing on engine performance and tailpipe emissions were also investigated. A detailed energy balance approach was employed to study the thermal behaviour of the active thermal coating. In general, improvements in indicated specific fuel consumption were not statistically significant for the coated piston over the whole test matrix. Mean exhaust temperature showed a marginal increase with the coated piston of up to 6 °C.

A significant number of historical engine powerloss events have recently been attributed to ingestion of high altitude ice crystals, prompting regulators to expand engine certification envelopes to incorporate ‘ice crystal icing’ conditions. There has been a resulting effort by OEMs and academia to develop analytical and semi-empirical models for the phenomenon, partly through use of rig testing. The current study presents results and analysis of experiments conducted in the National Research Council’s Research Altitude Test Facility (RATFac). The experiments used a simplified compressor stator vane test article, designed to produce data to build semi-empirical models and validate an existing ice crystal icing code. Accretion growth rates, extracted from backlit shadowgraphy, are presented as a function of test condition, and the algorithm of a new image processing technique using Canny filtering is discussed.

Numerous turbofan power-loss events have occurred in high altitude locations in the presence of ice crystals. It is theorized that ice crystals enter the engine core, partially melt in the compressor and then accrete onto stator blade surfaces. This may lead to engine rollback, or shed induced blade damage, surge and/or flameout. The first generation of ice crystal icing predictive models use a single flow field where there is no accretion to calculate particle trajectories and accretion growth rates. Recent work completed at the University of Oxford has created an algorithm to automatically detect the edge of accretion from experimental video data. Using these accretion profiles, numerical simulations were carried out at discrete points in time using a manual meshing process.

High altitude ice crystals can pose a threat to aircraft engine compression and combustion systems. Cases of engine damage, surge and rollback have been recorded in recent years, believed due to ice crystals partially melting and accreting on static surfaces (stators, endwalls and ducting). The increased awareness and understanding of this phenomenon has resulted in the extension of icing certification requirements to include glaciated and mixed phase conditions. Developing semi-empirical models is a cost effective way of enabling certification, and providing simple design rules for next generation engines. A comprehensive ice crystal icing model is presented in this paper, the Ice Crystal Icing ComputationaL Environment (ICICLE). It is modular in design, comprising a baseline code consisting of an axisymmetric or 2D planar flowfield solution, Lagrangian particle tracking, air-particle heat transfer and phase change, and surface interactions (bouncing, fragmentation, sticking).

Chromium-molybdenum alloy steel pistons, which have been used in commercial vehicle applications for some time, have more recently been proposed as a means of improving thermal efficiency in light-duty applications. This work reports a comparison of the effects of geometrically similar aluminium and steel pistons on the combustion characteristics and energy flows on a single cylinder high-speed direct injection diesel research engine tested at two speed / load conditions (1500 rpm / 6.9 bar nIMEP and 2000 rpm/25.8 bar nIMEP) both with and without EGR. The results indicate that changing to an alloy steel piston can provide a significant benefit in brake thermal efficiency at part-load and a reduced (but non-negligible) benefit at the high-load condition and also a reduction in fuel consumption. These benefits were attributed primarily to a reduction in friction losses.

In-cylinder flow motion has a significant effect on mixture preparation and combustion. Therefore, it is vital that CFD engine simulations are capable of accurately predicting the in-cylinder velocity fields. High-speed planar Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) experiments have been performed on a single-cylinder GDI optical engine in order to validate CFD simulations for a range of engine conditions. Novel metrics have been developed to quantify the differences between experimental and simulated velocity fields in both alignment and magnitude. The Weighted Relevance Index (WRI) is a variation of the standard Relevance Index that accounts for the local velocity magnitudes to provide a robust comparison of the alignment between two vector fields. Similarly, the Weighted Magnitude Index (WMI) quantifies the differences in the local magnitudes of the two velocity fields.

In-cylinder temperatures and their cyclic variations strongly influence many aspects of internal combustion engine operation, from chemical reaction rates determining the production of NOx and particulate matter to the tendency for auto-ignition leading to knock in spark ignition engines. Spatially resolved measurements of temperature can provide insights into such processes and enable validation of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations used to model engine performance and guide engine design. This work uses a combination of Two-Colour Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (TC-PLIF) and Laser Induced Grating Spectroscopy (LIGS) to measure the in-cylinder temperature distributions of a firing optically accessible spark ignition engine. TC-PLIF performs 2-D temperature measurements using fluorescence emission in two different wavelength bands but requires calibration under conditions of known temperature, pressure and composition.

Knowledge of fuel mass injected in an individual cycle is important for engine performance and modelling. Currently direct measurements of fuel flow to individual cylinders of an engine are not possible on-engine or in real-time due to a lack of available appropriate measurement techniques. The objective of this work was to undertake real-time Coriolis fuel flow measurement using GDI injectors on a rig observing fuel mass flow rate within individual fuel injections. This paper evaluates the potential of this technology - combining Coriolis Flow Meters (CFMs) with Prism signal processing together known as Fast Next Generation Coriolis (Fast NGC), and serves as a basis for future transitions on-engine applications. A rig-based feasibility study has been undertaken injecting gasoline through a GDI injector at 150 bar in both single shot mode and at a simulated engine speeds of 1788 and 2978 rpm. The results show that these injections can, in principle, be observed.

Knowledge of fuel mass injected in an individual cycle is important for engine performance and modeling. At the moment, such measurements are not possible on engine or in real time. In this article, a new method using Coriolis flow meters (CFMs) and a new, patented, signal processing technique, known as the Prism, are introduced. CFMs are extensively used for flow measurement both in the automotive industry and further afield and, when coupled with the Prism, have the potential to make these challenging high-speed measurements. A rig-based feasibility study was conducted injecting very small quantities of diesel (3 mg) at pressures of up to 1000 bar at simulated engine speeds of up to 4000 rpm. The results show that these small quantities can in principle be measured. The results also reveal a previously unknown behavior of CFMs when measuring very low flow rates at high speed.

Accurate modeling of the initial transient period of spray development is critical within diesel engines, as it impacts on the amount of vapor penetration and hence the combustion characteristics of the spray. In addition, in multiple injection schemes shorter injections will be mostly, if not totally, within the initial transient period. This paper investigates how two different commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes (hereafter noted as Code 1 and Code 2) simulate transient diesel spray atomization, in a non-combusting environment. The case considered for comparison is a single-hole injection of n-dodecane representing the Engine Combustion Network’s ‘Spray A’ condition. It was identified that the different spray break-up models used by the codes (Reitz-Diwakar for Code 1, Kelvin-Helmholtz/Rayleigh-Taylor (KH-RT) for Code 2) had a significant impact on the transient liquid penetration.

A wide-ranging investigation into the sensitivity of the hybrid RANS-LES based OpenFOAM CFD process at Audi was undertaken. For a range of cars (A1, TT, Q3 & A4) the influence of the computational grid resolution, turbulence model formulation and spatial & temporal discretization is assessed. It is shown that SnappyHexMesh, the Cartesian-prismatic built-in OpenFOAM mesher is unable to generate low y+ grids of sufficient quality for the production Audi car geometries. For high y+ grids there was not a consistent trend of additional refinement leading to improved correlation between CFD and experimental data. Similar conclusions were found for the turbulence models and numerical schemes, where consistent improvements over the baseline setup for all aerodynamic force coefficients were in general not possible. The A1 vehicle exhibited the greatest sensitivity to methodology changes, with the TT showing the least sensitivity.

Diesel engine designers often use swirl flaps to increase air motion in cylinder at low engine speeds, where lower piston velocities reduce natural in-cylinder swirl. Such in-cylinder motion reduces smoke and CO emissions by improved fuel-air mixing. However, swirl flaps, acting like a throttle on a gasoline engine, create an additional pressure drop in the inlet manifold and thereby increase pumping work and fuel consumption. In addition, by increasing the fuel-air mixing in cylinder the combustion duration is shortened and the combustion temperature is increased; this has the effect of increasing NOx emissions. Typically, EGR rates are correspondingly increased to mitigate this effect. Late inlet valve closure, which reduces an engine’s effective compression ratio, has been shown to provide an alternative method of reducing NOx emissions.

The analysis of thermal fields in the underhood region is complicated by the complex geometry and the influence of a multitude of different heat sources. This complexity means that running full CFD analyses to predict the thermal field in this region is both computationally expensive and time consuming. A method of predicting the thermal field using linear superposition has been developed in order to analyse the underhood region of a simplified Formula One race car, though the technique is applicable to all vehicles. The use of linear superposition allows accurate predictions of the thermal field within a complex geometry for varying boundary conditions with negligible computational costs once the initial characterisation CFD has been run. A quarter scale, rear end model of a Formula One race car with a simplified internal assembly is considered for analysis, though the technique can also be applied to commercial and industrial vehicles.

PICASSOS was a UK government funded programme to improve the ability of automotive supply chains to develop complex software-intensive systems with high safety assurance and at an acceptable cost. This was executed by a consortium of three universities and five companies including an automotive OEM and suppliers. Three major elements of the PICASSOS project were: use of automated model based verification technology utilising formal methods; application of this technology in the context of ISO 26262; and evaluation to measure the impact of this approach to inform key management decisions on the costs, benefits and risks of applying this technology on live projects. The project spanned system level design and software development. This was achieved by using a unified model based process incorporating SysML at the system level and using Simulink and Stateflow auto-coded into C at the software level.

The introduction of transient test cycles and the focus on real world driving emissions has increased the importance of ensuring the NOx and soot emissions are controlled during transient manoeuvres. At the same time, there is a drive to reduce the number of calibration variables used by engine control strategies to reduce development effort and costs. In this paper, a control orientated combustion model, [1], and model predictive control strategy, [2], that were developed in simulation and reported in earlier papers, are applied to a Diesel engine and demonstrated in a test vehicle. The paper describes how the control approach developed in simulation was implemented in embedded hardware, using an FPGA to accelerate the emissions calculations. The development of the predictive controller includes the application of a simplified optimisation algorithm to enable a real-time calculation in the test vehicle.

Model M15 gasoline fuels have been created from pure fuel components, to give independent control of volatility, the heavy end content and the aromatic content, in order to understand the effect of the fuel properties on Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) fuel spray behaviour and the subsequent particulate number emissions. Each fuel was imaged at a range of fuel temperatures in a spray rig and in a motored optical engine, to cover the full range from non-flashing sprays through to flare flashing sprays. The spray axial penetration (and potential piston and liner impingement), and spray evaporation rate were extracted from the images. Firing engine tests with the fuels with the same fuel temperatures were performed and exhaust particulate number spectra captured using a DMS500 Mark II Particle Spectrometer.