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For further increase in thermal efficiency of heavy-duty diesel engines, flexible regulation of the heat release rate (HRR) profile combined with higher compression ratio could have more rooms to improve indicated thermal efficiency by overcoming various drawbacks relevant to higher compression ratio. A new ideal HRR profile, which starts as a kind of delta shape to fulfil the isobaric cycle from top-dead-center (TDC) and is followed by the significant increase in HRR to reach the maximum cylinder pressure in the retarded timing, was proposed. We call it as ‘High-heels’ HRR profile from its two-step-increase delta shape. To confirm the potential of the ideal HRR profile by utilizing a single- cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine, a variable fuel injection rate equipment, novel combustion chamber designs, and an offset orifices nozzle were investigated as the technologies for modifying HRR profile.

To reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from heavy-duty diesel engines down to zero until 2050, alternative powertrain strategies have been proposed in lieu of the improvements in internal combustion engines (ICEs). However, total amount of renewable electricity could be limited for the constructing infrastructure, the production of new battery and/or fuel cell vehicles and the operation of them compared with the growing demand of transportation in the future. Therefore, drastic improvement in transport efficiency with suppressing the increase of total CO2 emissions is essential. From these points of view, extremely high efficiency ICEs, combined or at least compatible with carbon neutral or renewable fuels having the capability of drop-in into the conventional fuels, should be attracted attention. Nevertheless, there have been few studies on the effects of fuel properties for further improving fuel consumption of diesel ICEs.

Cooling loss reduction is essential to enable further increases in thermal efficiency of reciprocating internal combustion engines. Many in-cylinder cooling loss reduction studies have been carried out by applying various thermal barrier coatings to the piston and/or other in-cylinder surfaces, taking advantage of the lower thermal effusivity of ceramic materials. However, the end result was mostly minimal or in some cases, negative. In our previous study, significant cooling loss reduction was experimentally confirmed by utilizing a mirror-like polished stainless-steel thermal sprayed surface (HVOF: high velocity oxy-fuel) on a forged steel piston. This study firstly investigated an alternative insulating layer material to stainless-steel, along with effects of its thickness on heat transfer by a one-dimensional unsteady numerical model. Results showed that lower thermal effusivity doesn’t always reduce heat transfer, but increases nonuniformity of surface temperature.

This study focused on the technology integration to aim beyond 60% indicated thermal efficiency (ITE) with a single-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine as an alternative to achieve 55% brake thermal efficiency (BTE) with multiple-cylinder engines. Technology assessment was initially carried out by means of a simple chart of showing ITE and exhaust heat loss as functions of cooling loss and heat conversion efficiency into indicated work. The proposed compression ratio (28:1), excess air ratio and new ideal thermodynamic cycle were then determined by a simple cycle calculation. Except for peak cylinder pressure constraint for each engine, the technical barriers for further ITE improvement are mainly laid in cooling loss reduction, fuel-air mixture formation improvement, and heat release rate optimization under very high temperature and density conditions with very high compression ratio (smaller cavity volume).

This study investigates simultaneous improvement in thermal efficiency and cooling loss in the wider operating condition. To suppress the heat flux of the piston, the piston top and cavity were treated with thin thermal spraying of stainless steel. Thermal diffusivity of stainless steel (X5CrNiMo17-12-2, SUS316) is very low in comparison with the forged steel piston raw material (34CrMoS4, SCM435) to sustain local surface temperature at where spray flame directly interfered. In addition, its surface roughness was very fine finished aiming to reduce the convective heat transfer. The experimental results with the stainless-steel coated piston by utilizing a single cylinder engine showed the significant improvement in both cooling loss and thermal efficiency even in higher load operating conditions with compression ratio of 23.5:1.

An increased cycle expansion ratio is beneficial from a thermodynamic viewpoint to increase the engine efficiency. In this study, the target compression ratio and corresponding thermodynamic cycle layout were investigated by means of a new ideal combustion cycle. To model the experimental pressure traces, the combustion was divided into three parts; constant volume combustion, early expansion combustion and late combustion. This study discussed optimal parameter values for compression ignition combustion under PFP constraints. These parameters included compression ratio, pressure ratios as well as cut-off ratios. Furthermore, this study experimentally investigated the limitation of thermal efficiency and the variation of energy losses under different geometric compression ratios, boosting pressure and degree of constant volume combustion. These experiments utilized a supercharged single-cylinder heavy duty diesel engine with PFP-capability of up to 30 MPa.

The heterogeneous character of diesel engine combustion is well-known. However, in the thermodynamic efficiency calculations, a homogenous combustion is generally assumed. This results in poor accuracy of specific heat ratio estimations. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate how the real diesel engine specific heat ratio behaves by means of a two-zone model calculation. Efficiency improvement from a higher burned zone specific heat ratio was investigated. This was achieved by better air entrainment and a highly dispersed flame in the cylinder. To investigate into the local phenomena, combustion homogeneity was estimated by utilizing the two-zone model where the in-cylinder volume was divided into unburned zones and burned zones. To numerically confirm the effect of a highly dispersed flame on the specific heat ratio, a single-cylinder diesel engine equipped with three injectors (located at the cylinder center as well as at the rim of the piston bowl) was utilized.

According to thermodynamic analysis of ideal engine cycles, Otto cycle thermal efficiency exceeds that of the Diesel and Sabathe (or Dual) cycles. However, zero-dimensional calculations indicated that the brake thermal efficiency (BTE) of an actual Otto or Diesel engine could be higher with a Sabathe (or Seilliger) type cycle, within a limited peak firing pressure (PFP). To confirm these results with an actual engine, a three-injector combustion system (center and two sides) was utilized to allow more flexibility in the heat release rate (HRR) profile than the conventional single injector system in the previous study. The experimental result was qualitatively consistent with the calculated results even though its HRR had less peak and longer duration than ideal. In this study, a new thermodynamic cycle with higher HRR in the expansion stroke than the ideal Sabathe cycle, was thus developed. The proposed (higher) HRR was achieved by overlapped fuel injection with the three injectors.

To reduce heat transfer between hot gas and cavity wall, thin Zirconia (ZrO2) layer (0.5mm) on the cavity surface of a forged steel piston was firstly formed by thermal spray coating aiming higher surface temperature swing precisely synchronized with flame temperature near the wall resulting in the reduction of temperature difference. However, no apparent difference in the heat loss was analyzed. To find out the reason why the heat loss was not so improved, direct observation of flame impingement to the cavity wall was carried out with the top view visualization technique, for which one of the exhaust valves was modified to a sapphire window. Local flame behavior very close to the wall was compared by macrophotography. Numerical analysis by utilizing a three-dimensional simulation was also carried out to investigate the effect of several parameters on the heat transfer coefficient.

With the development of downsized spark ignition (SI) engines, low-speed pre-ignition (LSPI) has been observed more frequently as an abnormal combustion phenomenon, and there is a critical need to solve this issue. It has been acknowledged that LSPI is not directly triggered by autoignition of the fuel, but by some other material with a short ignition delay time. It was previously reported that LSPI can be caused by droplets of lubricant oil intermixed with the fuel. In this work, the ignition behavior of lubricant component containing fuel droplets was experimentally investigated by using a constant volume chamber (CVC) and a rapid compression and expansion machine (RCEM), which enable visualization of the combustion process in the cylinder. Various combinations of fuel compositions for the ambient fuel-air mixture and fractions of base oil/metallic additives/fuel for droplets were tested.

To overcome the trade-offs of thermal efficiency with energy loss and exhaust emissions typical of conventional diesel engines, a new diffusion-combustion-based concept with multiple fuel injectors has been developed. This engine employs neither low temperature combustion nor homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion. One injector was mounted vertically at the cylinder center like in a conventional direct injection diesel engine, and two additional injectors were slant-mounted at the piston cavity circumference. The sprays from the side injectors were directed along the swirl direction to prevent both spray interference and spray impingement on the cavity wall, while improving air utilization near the center of the cavity.

A mixed time-scale subgrid large eddy simulation was used to simulate mixture formation, combustion and soot formation under the influence of turbulence during diesel engine combustion. To account for the effects of engine wall heat transfer on combustion, the KIVA code's standard wall model was replaced to accommodate more realistic boundary conditions. This were carried out by implementing the non-isothermal wall model of Angelberger et al. with modifications and incorporating the log law from Pope's method to account for the wall surface roughness. Soot and NOx emissions predicted with the new model are compared to experimental data acquired under various EGR conditions.

Experimental and numerical studies were conducted on diesel particulate filters (DPFs) under different soot loading conditions and DPF configurations. Pressure drops across DPFs with various mean pore diameters loaded with soots having different mean particle diameters were measured by introducing exhaust gases from a 2.2 liter inline four-cylinder, TCI diesel engine designed for use in passenger cars. A mechanistic hypothesis was then proposed to explain the observed trends, accounting for the effects of the soot loading regime in the wall and the soot cake layer on the pressure drop. This hypothesis was used to guide the development and validation of a numerical model for predicting the pressure drop in the DPF. The relationship between the permeability and the porosity of the wall and soot cake layer was modeled under various soot loading conditions.

A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (3D-CFD) code was combined with a detailed combustion chamber heat transfer model. The established model allowed not only prediction of instantaneous combustion chamber wall surface temperature distributions in practical calculation time but also investigation of the characteristics of combustion, emissions and heat losses affected by the wall temperature distributions. Although zero-dimensional combustion analysis can consider temporal changes in the heat transfer coefficient and in-cylinder gas temperature, it cannot take into account the effect of interactions between spatially distributed charge and wall temperatures. In contrast, 3D-CFD analysis can consider temporal and spatial changes in both parameters. However, in most zero-/multi- dimensional combustion analyses, wall temperatures are assumed to be temporally constant and spatially homogeneous.

Impingement of a spray flame on the periphery of the piston cavity strongly affects heat loss to the wall. The heat release rate history is also closely correlated with the indicated thermal efficiency. For further thermal efficiency improvement, it is thus necessary to understand such phenomena in state of the art diesel engines, by observation of the actual behavior of an impinging spray flame and measurement of the local temperature and flow velocity. A top-view optically accessible engine system, for which flame impingement to the cavity wall can be observed from the top (vertically), was equipped with a high speed digital camera for direct observation. Once the flame impinged on the wall, flame tip temperature decreased roughly 100K, compared to the temperature before impingement.

In heavy duty diesel engines, the waste heat recovery has attracted much attention as one of the technologies to improve fuel economy further. In this study, the available energy of the waste heat from a high boosted 6-cylinder heavy duty diesel engine which is equipped with a high pressure loop EGR system (HPL-EGR system) and low pressure loop EGR system (LPL-EGR system) was evaluated based on the second law of thermodynamics. The maximum potential of the waste heat recovery for improvement in brake thermal efficiency and the effect of the Rankine combined cycle on fuel economy were estimated for each single-stage turbocharging system (single-stage system) and 2-stage turbocharging system (2-stage system).

The objective of the present study is to analyze soot formation in diesel engine combustion by using multi-dimensional combustion simulations with a parallelized explicit ODE solver. Parallelized CHEMEQ2 was used to perform detailed chemical kinetics in KIVA-4 code. CHEMEQ2 is an explicit stiff ODE solver developed by Mott et al. which is known to be faster than traditional implicit ODE solvers, e.g., DVODE. In the present study, about eight times faster computation was achieved with CHEMEQ2 compared to DVODE when using a single thread. Further, by parallelizing CHEMEQ2 using OpenMP, the simulations could be run not only on calculation servers but also on desktop machines. The computation time decreases with the number of threads used. The parallelized CHEMEQ2 enabled combustion and emission characteristics, including detailed soot formation processes, to be predicted using KIVA-4 code with detailed chemical kinetics without the need for reducing the reaction mechanism.

As the petroleum depletion, some of this demand will probably have to be met by increasing the production of diesel fuels from heavy oil or unconventional oil in the near future. Such fuels may inevitably have a lower cetane number (CN) with a higher concentration of aromatic components. The objective of the present research is to identify the effects of a typical biodiesel fuel as a CN improver for a light-duty diesel engine for passenger cars. Our previous study indicates that methyl oleate (MO), which is an oxygenated fuel representative of major constituents of many biodiesel types, can reduce soot and NOx emissions simultaneously by optimizing performance under exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) when used as a diesel fuel additive. In addition, it was found that MO tends to reduce the ignition delay. We employed a 2.2 L passenger car DI diesel engine complying with the Euro 4 emissions regulation.

Heat loss reduction could be one of the most promising methods of thermal efficiency improvement for modern diesel engines. However, it is difficult to fully transform the available energy derived from a reduction of in-cylinder heat loss into shaft work, but it is rather more readily converted into higher exhaust heat loss. It may therefore be favorable to increase the effective expansion ratio of the engine, thereby maximizing the brake work, by transforming more of the enthalpy otherwise remaining at exhaust valve opening (EVO) into work. In general, the geometric compression ratio of a piston cylinder arrangement has to increase in order to achieve a higher expansion ratio, which is equal to a higher thermodynamic compression ratio.

The objective of the present research is to analyze the effects of using oxygenated fuels (FAMEs) on diesel engine combustion and emission (NOx and soot). We studied methyl oleate (MO), which is an oxygenated fuel representative of major constituents of many types of biodiesels. Engine tests and numerical simulations were performed for 100% MO (MO100), 40% MO blended with JIS#2 diesel (MO40) and JIS#2 diesel (D100). The effects of MO on diesel combustion and emission characteristics were studied under engine operating conditions typically encountered in passenger car diesel engines, focusing on important parameters such as pilot injection, injection pressure and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rate. We used a diesel engine complying with the EURO4 emissions regulation, having a displacement of 2.2 L for passenger car applications. In engine tests comparing MO with diesel fuel, no effect on engine combustion pressure was observed for all conditions tested.