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Ejector as a work recovery device offers potential for developing energy efficient heating and cooling systems based on vapor compression technology. For applications like automobile air conditioning, the operating conditions vary significantly which can lead to considerable performance degradation when the system is operated in off-design conditions. Therefore, system designing warrants development of accurate ejector performance models for a wide range of operating conditions. In this paper, a novel methodology for ejector performance maps is proposed using ejector efficiency as performance parameter and volumetric entrainment ratio as characterization parameter. The proposed performance map is developed after conducting experiments to find appropriate performance representation where ejector driven flow can be characterized using ejector motive flow. The developed performance map can predict ejector pressure lift within an accuracy of 20% using an iterative solver.

Several types of noise exist in automobiles. The flow-induced noise in the expansion device can be very disturbing since the expansion device is located near the occupants. In many studies, the flow-induced noise is found to be mitigated when the orientation of the tube is changed. However, no study explores the reason why flow-induced noise changes when the orientation of the tube is changed. The flow-induced noise varies along with the flow regimes near the expansion devices. In this paper, an experimental based research is used to study how the tube orientation changes the flow regimes under the same operating conditions. A pumped R134a system with transparent tubes (1/4-inch ID) is used to visualize the flow regimes near the manual expansion valve. The transparent tube is a continuous connection of horizontal tubes, 45° inclined tubes, and vertical tubes.

Expansion work recovery by two-phase ejector is known to be beneficial to vapor compression cycle performance. However, one of the biggest challenges with ejector vapor compression cycles is that the ejector cycle performance is sensitive to working condition changes which are common in automotive applications. Different working conditions require different ejector geometries to achieve maximum performance. Slightly different geometries may result in substantially different COPs under the same conditions. The ejector motive nozzle throat diameter (motive nozzle restrictiveness) is one of the key parameters that can significantly affect ejector cycle COP. This paper presents the experimental results of the application of a new two-phase nozzle restrictiveness control mechanism to an automotive transcritical R744 ejector cycle.

In this study, the influence of compressor speed, ejector motive nozzle needle position and evaporator inlet metering valve opening on the oil circulation rates (OCRs) of an automotive R744 transcritical standard ejector cycle was experimentally investigated. Significantly higher OCR (~10%) was observed at the evaporator inlet of the ejector cycle than at the high pressure side. It has been observed that evaporator OCR was increased with increasing compressor speed. When the motive nozzle needle moved towards the nozzle throat, both compressor discharge flow rate and evaporator OCR were observed to be significantly lowered. As the evaporator inlet metering valve opening was adjusted, the compressor mass flow rate did not vary significantly while the evaporator mass flow rate decreased with decreasing metering valve opening. The evaporator OCR decreased from 6.5% to 2.2% as the metering valve opening varied from 86% to 27%.

Air source heat pumps as the heating system for full electric vehicles are drawing more and more attention in recent years. Despite the high energy efficiency, frost accumulation on the heat pump evaporator is one of the major challenges associated with air source heat pumps. The evaporator needs to be actively defrosted periodically and heat pump heating will be interrupted during defrosting process. Proper defrost control is needed to obtain high average heat pump energy efficiency. In this paper, a new method for generating air source heat pump defrost control policy using reinforcement learning is introduced. This model-free method has several advantages. It can automatically generate optimal defrost control policy instead of requiring manually determination of the control policy parameters and logics.

Expansion work recovery by two-phase ejector is known to be beneficial to vapor compression cycle performance. However, one of the biggest challenges with ejector vapor compression cycle is that the ejector cycle performance is sensitive to working condition changes which are common in many applications, including automotive AC systems. Different working conditions require different ejector geometries to achieve maximum performance. Slightly different geometries may result in substantially different COPs under the same conditions. Ejector motive nozzle throat diameter (motive nozzle restrictiveness) is one of the key parameters that can significantly affect COP. This paper presents the experimental investigation of a new motive nozzle restrictiveness control mechanism for two-phase ejectors used in vapor compression cycles, which has the advantages of being simple, potentially less costly and less vulnerable to clogging.

This paper presents a simulation model for a reversible air conditioning and heat pump system for electric vehicles. The system contains a variable speed compressor, three microchannel heat exchangers, an accumulator, and two electronic expansion valves. Heat exchangers are solved by discretizing into cells. Compressor and accumulator models are developed by fitting data with physical insights. Expansion valves are modeled by isenthalpic processes. System performance is calculated by connecting all parts in the same way as the physical system and solved iteratively. The model is reasonably validated against experimental data from a separate experimental study. Future improvement is needed to take into account maldistribution in outdoor heat exchanger working as an evaporator in HP mode. Charge retention in components also requires further study.

Automotive air conditioning compressor produces an annular-mist flow consisting of gas-phase refrigerant flow with oil film and oil droplets. This paper reports a method to calculate the oil retention and oil circulation ratio based on oil film thickness, wave speed, oil droplet size, oil droplet speed, and mass flow rate. Oil flow parameters are measured by high-speed camera capture and video processing in a non-invasive way. The estimated oil retention and oil circulation ratio results are compared quantitatively with the measurements from system experiments under different compressor outlet gas superficial velocity. The agreement between video result and sampling measurement shows that this method can be applied in other annular-mist flow analysis. It is also shown that most of the oil exists in film from the mass point of view while oil droplets contributes more to the oil mass flow rate because they travel in a much higher speed.

Increasing energy costs justify research on how to improve utilization of low-grade energy that is abundantly available as waste heat from many thermodynamic processes such as internal combustion engine cycles. One option is to directly generate cooling through absorption/adsorption or vapor jet ejector cycles. As in the case of power generation cycles, cooling cycle efficiencies would increase if the heat input were available at higher temperature. This paper assesses the feasibility of a novel idea that uses a vortex tube to increase the available temperature levels of low-grade heat sources. The desired temperature increase is achieved by sending a stream of vapor that was heated by the waste heat source through a vortex tube, which further elevates the temperature used in a heat driven ejector cooling cycle.

This paper presents the experimentally obtained performance characteristics of an air conditioning-heat pump system that uses heat exchangers from a commercially available Nissan Leaf EV. It was found that refrigerant charge needed for cooling operation was larger than that for heating function with the test setup. The effects of: a). indoor air flow rate, b). outdoor air flow rate, and c). compressor speed on heating capacity and energy efficiency were explored and presented. Appropriate opening size of expansion valve that controlled subcooling for better energy efficiency was discussed and results were presented. Expansion valve opening size also strongly affected charge migration. Warm-up tests at different ambient conditions showed the necessity of a secondary heater to be reserved for very low ambient temperature.

Expansion work recovery by two-phase ejector is known to be beneficial to vapor compression cycle performance. However, one of the biggest challenges with ejector vapor compression cycles is that the ejector cycle performance is sensitive to working condition changes which are common in automotive applications. Different working conditions require different ejector geometries to achieve maximum performance. Slightly different geometries may result in substantially different COPs under the same conditions. The ejector motive nozzle throat diameter (motive nozzle restrictiveness) is one of the key parameters that can significantly affect ejector cycle COP. This paper presents a new two-phase nozzle restrictiveness control mechanism which is possibly applicable to two-phase ejectors used in vapor compression cycles.

Compared to conventional injection techniques, Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) has a lot of advantages such as increased fuel efficiency, high power output and low emission levels, which can be more accurately controlled. Therefore, this technique is an important topic of today's injection system research. Although the operating conditions of GDI injectors are simpler from a numerical point of view because of smaller Reynolds and Weber numbers compared to Diesel injection systems, accurate simulations of the breakup in the vicinity of the nozzle are very challenging. Combined with the complications of experimental techniques that could be applied inside the nozzle and at the nozzle exit, this is the reason for the lack of understanding the primary breakup behavior of current GDI injectors.

A key aim of research into cell phone tasks is to obtain an unbiased estimate of their relative risk (RR) for crashes. This paper re-examines five RR estimates of cell phone conversation in automobiles. The Toronto and Australian studies estimated an RR near 4, but used subjective estimates of driving and crash times. The OnStar, 100-Car, and a recent naturalistic study used objective measures of driving and crash times and estimated an RR near 1, not 4 - a major discrepancy. Analysis of data from GPS trip studies shows that people were in the car only 20% of the time on any given prior day at the same clock time they were in the car on a later day. Hence, the Toronto estimate of driving time during control windows must be reduced from 10 to 2 min.

The numerical models presented in this study are established based on discrete phase model (DPM) of spray dispersion and evaporation considering the cold wall operating condition of port injection system. All the models were implemented into the CFD software FLUENT. Gas flow and film flow and spray are coupled by mass, momentum and energy transfer due to spray impingement, film evaporation and surface shear stress. Influences of impact parameters including injection height, injection duration and injection angle on the formation and evaporation of wall-film are discussed. The results show that, with the increase of injection height, the maximum film thickness and wall film ratio decrease, and fuel vapor mass ratio increases. The reductions of film thickness and wall film ratio are not obvious as the increasing of injection height. Extending the injection duration could add the maximum film thickness and film area.

Lubricant in compressor usually flows out with refrigerant. Thus, it is evitable for lubricant to be present in the heat exchanger, which significantly affects the heat exchanger performance. This paper is to investigate the effects of PAG oil on R134a distribution in the microchannel heat exchanger (MCHX) with vertical headers and to provide a tool to model R134a (with oil) distribution and its effects on MCHX capacity. The flow configuration in MCHX under the heat pump mode of the reversible system is mimicked in the experimental facility: refrigerant-oil mixture is fed into the test header from the bottom pass and exits through the top pass. It is found that a small amount of oil (OCR=0.5%) worsen the distribution. But further increasing OCR to 2.5% and 4.7%, the distribution becomes better.

A hot and cold water mixing process with a steam condenser and a chilled water heat exchanger is set up for an engine EGR fouling test. The test rig has water recycled in the loop of a pump, heat exchangers, a three-way mixing valve, and a test EGR unit. The target unit temperature is controlled by a heating, cooling and mixing process with individual valves regulating the flow-rate of saturated steam, chilled water and mixing ratio. The challenges in control design are the dead-time, interaction, nonlinearity and multivariable characteristics of heat exchangers, plus the flow recycle in the system. A systems method is applied to extract a simple linear model for control design. The method avoids the nonlinearity and interaction among different temperatures at inlet, outlet and flow-rate. The test data proves the effectiveness of systems analysis and modeling methodology. As a result, the first-order linear model facilitates the controller design.

The improvement of spray atomization and penetration characteristics of GDI multi-hole injector sprays is a major component of the engine combustion developments, in order to achieve the fuel economy and emissions standards. Significant R&D efforts are directed towards optimization of the nozzle designs, in order to achieve optimum multi-objective spray characteristics. The Volume-of-Fluid Large-Eddy-Simulation (VOF-LES) of the injector internal flow and spray break-up processes offers a computational capability to aid development of a fundamental knowledge of the liquid jet breakup process. It is a unique simulation method capable of simultaneous analysis of the injector nozzle internal flow and the near-field jet breakup process. Hence it provides a powerful toll to investigate the influence of nozzle design parameters on the spray geometric and atomization features and, consequently, reduces reliance on hardware trial-and-tests for multi-objective spray optimizations.

Multi-hole DI injectors are being adopted in the advanced downsized DISI ICE powertrain in the automotive industry worldwide because of their robustness and cost-performance. Although their injector design and spray resembles those of DI diesel injectors, there are many basic but distinct differences due to different injection pressure and fuel properties, the sac design, lower L/D aspect ratios in the nozzle hole, closer spray-to-spray angle and hense interactions. This paper used Phase-Contrast X ray techniques to visualize the spray near a 3-hole DI gasoline research model injector exit and compared to the visible light visualization and the internal flow predictions using with multi-dimensional multi-phase CFD simulations. The results show that strong interactions of the vortex strings, cavitation, and turbulence in and near the nozzles make the multi-phase turbulent flow very complicated and dominate the near nozzle breakup mechanisms quite unlike those of diesel injections.

Advanced valvetrain coupled with Direct Injection (DI) provides an opportunity to simultaneous reduction of fuel consumption and emissions. Because of their robustness and cost performance, multi-hole injectors are being adopted as gasoline DI fuel injectors. Ethanol and ethanol-gasoline blends synergistically improve the performance of a turbo-charged DI gasoline engine, especially in down-sized, down-sped and variable-valvetrain engine architecture. This paper presents Mie-scattering spray imaging results taken with an Optical Accessible Engine (OAE). OAE offers dynamic and realistic in-cylinder charge motion with direct imaging capability, and the interaction with the ethanol spray with the intake air is studied. Two types of cams which are designed for Early Intake Valve Close (EIVC) and Later Intake Valve Close (LIVC) are tested, and the effect of variable valve profile and deactivation of one of the intake valves are discussed.

This paper summarizes a systematic approach to control of nonlinear automotive systems exposed to fast transients. This approach is based on a combined application of hardware characterization, which inverts nonlinearities, and conventional Proportional-plus-Integral-plus-Derivative (PID) control. The approach renders the closed-loop system dynamics more transparent and simplifies the controller design and calibration for applications in automotive industry. The authors have found this approach effective in presenting and teaching PID controller design and calibration guidelines to automotive engineering audience, who at times may not have formal training in controls but need to understand the development and calibration process of simple controllers.