Search Results

The high-efficiency dedicated hybrid engine (DHE) has led to increasingly complex challenges in engine thermal management. On one hand, the high compression ratio of up to 16:1 makes the engine more susceptible to knocking, necessitating meticulous thermal management to mitigate the potential sensitivity to metal temperature. On the other hand, extensive use of external cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) helps reduce knocking and improve thermal efficiency, but it also raises temperature levels and requires additional cooling measures. For the 1.5L DHE developed by SAIC Motor, a split cooling structure was employed in the engine cooling system design, with the cylinder head water jacket and cylinder block water jacket arranged in parallel and equipped with different coolant outlets. By utilizing a dual thermostat to control flow, this design allows for adjustable flow distribution, providing effective cooling to the cylinder head while reducing cooling to the cylinder block.

In the pursuit of carbon emission reduction, hybridization has emerged as a significant trend in powertrain electrification. As a crucial aspect of hybrid powertrain system development, achieving high brake thermal efficiency (BTE) and a wide operating range with high efficiency are essential for hybrid engines to effectively integrate with the hybrid system. When developing dedicated hybrid engines (DHE), several design considerations come into play. First, in order to make efficient use of available resources and enable engine production on the same assembly line as conventional engines, it is crucial to maintain consistency in key design parameters of the cylinder head and block, thus extending the platform-based design approach. Among the key measures to achieve high BTE, cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) has been extensively explored and proven effective in improving efficiency by mitigating knocking and reducing engine cooling heat loss.

The introduction of more stringent emission regulatory standards, such as China 6 and Euro 6, with test cycles that are more representative of real-world driving, from WLTP to RDE presents significant challenges to the emission development of internal combustion engine program. In the typical development process, the emission development requires complex work such as after-treatment development and calibration optimizations. In addition, it is late in the process, after the prototype vehicle that is more representative of the production status is ready. To address the situation outlined above, an Engine-in-the-Loop (EIL) testing methodology is developed at SAIC Motor, to front load part of the emission development work to the engine testbed early in the development stage, in the face of ever compressed vehicle program development time. This methodology is to emulate vehicle operations on the engine testbed. Key techniques are developed to achieve this.

SAIC Motor has developed an all new 2.0 L 4-cylinder turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine to meet the market demand and increasingly stringent requirement of CAFE and tail-pipe emission regulations. A series of advanced technologies have been employed in this engine to achieve high efficiency, high torque and power output, fast response low-end torque performance, refined NVH performance, all at market leading level, and low engine-out emissions. These main technologies include: side mount gasoline direct injection with 35MPa fuel injection system, integrated exhaust manifold, high tumble combustion system, 2-step intake variable valve lift (DVVL) with Miller Cycle, efficient turbo charging with electric wastegate (EWG), light weight and compact structural designs, NVH measures including balancer system with silence gear, friction reduction measures, optimized thermal management, etc.

The present paper describes a CAE analysis approach to evaluate the transient cylinder head gasket sealing performance of a turbo charged GDI engine in the bench test development. In this approach, both transient gasket sealing force and gasket wear work are calculated to allow design engineers to find out the root cause of cylinder head gasket leakage failures. In this paper, the details of the method development are described. Firstly how to use and get the cylinder head gasket property are described, which is the basic theory and data for the gasket sealing analysis. A transient heat transfer calculation for accurately simulating the engine thermal shock test is established, which is mapped to the transient gasket sealing calculation as pivotal boundary.

PN(Particle Number) emission limits are more stringent for gasoline vehicles in Chinese VI emission standards (6×1011 #/km). A EEPS engine exhaust particle size spectrometer was employed to characterize the effects of injection strategies on particulates emissions from a turbocharged gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine. The effects of operating parameters (injection pressure, second injection ratio and second injection end time) on particle diameter distribution and particle number density of emission was Investigated. The experimental result indicates that the quantity of particles decrease with the increase of injection pressure obviously, especially at high load including the 20% reduction of the particle number density. When the engine is at low load, the accumulation mode particle emissions are higher than the nucleation mode particle emissions compared with high load, which present opposite results. The second injection can restrain engine knock at low speed.

In order to predict more accurately the cracking failure of cylinder head during the durability test of turbocharged engine in the development, a comprehensive evaluation method of cylinder head durability is established. In this method, both high cycle and low cycle fatigue performance are calculated to provide failure assessment. The method is then applied to investigate the root cause of cracking of cylinder head and assess design optimizations. Multidisciplinary approach is adopted to optimize high cycle fatigue and low cycle fatigue performance simultaneously to achieve the best comprehensive performance. In this paper, the details of the method development are described. First, the high cycle and low cycle fatigue properties of cylinder head material were measured at different temperature condition, and the fatigue life and high temperature creep properties of materials under thermo-mechanical fatigue cycle were also tested.

SAIC Motor Corporation Limited (SAIC Motor) has developed a new 1.5 L 4-cylinder turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine to meet the market demand and increasingly stringent requirement of CAFE and tail-pipe emission regulations. A series of advanced technologies for improving engine fuel economy, engine-out emission, torque and power output specially low end torque performance have been employed, such as: central gasoline direct injection, integrated exhaust manifold, high tumble combustion system, Miller Cycle, cooled external EGR, 35MPa fuel injection system, multi-hole injector with variable hole size design, efficient turbo charging with electric wastegate (EWG), etc. As a result, the engine is able to achieve over 39% brake thermal efficiency (BTE), as well as substantial fuel consumption reduction in vehicle driving cycle. It delivers 275 Nm maximum torque and 127kW rated power, with fast low end torque response.

Gasoline compression ignition (GCI) combustion is a promising solution to address increasingly stringent efficiency and emissions regulations imposed on the internal combustion engine. However, the high resistance to auto-ignition of modern market gasoline makes low load compression ignition (CI) operation difficult. Accordingly, a method that enables the variation of the fuel reactivity on demand is an ideal solution to address low load stability issues. Metal engine experiments conducted on a single cylinder medium-duty research engine allowed for the investigation of this strategy. The fuels used for this study were 87 octane gasoline (primary fuel stream) and diesel fuel (reactivity enhancer). Initial tests demonstrated load extension down to idle conditions with only 20% diesel by mass, which reduced to 0% at loads above 3 bar IMEPg.

Engine downsizing has become a leading trend for fuel consumption reduction while maintaining the high specific power and torque output. Because of this, Turbo-charged Gasoline Direct Injection (TGDI) technology has been widely applied in passenger vehicles even though a number of technical challenges are presented during the engine development. This paper presents the investigation results of three key issues in the combustion development of a 2.0L TGDI engine at SAIC motor: fuel dilution, smoke emission and low speed stochastic pre-ignition(LSPI). The effect of the injection timing and injection strategy on fuel dilution and smoke emission, and LSPI are the focus of the experimental study.

Dual loop EGR systems (having both a high pressure loop EGR and a low pressure loop EGR) have been successfully applied to multiple light-duty diesel engines to meet Tier 2 Bin 5 and Euro 5/6 emissions regulations [1, 2], including the 2009 model year VW Jetta 2.0TDI. Hyundai and Toyota also published their studies with dual loop EGR systems [3, 4]. More interest exists on the low pressure loop EGR effects on medium to heavy duty applications [5]. Since the duty cycles of light duty diesel and heavy duty diesel applications are very different, how to apply the dual loop EGR systems to heavy duty applications and understanding their limitations are less documented and published. As a specific type of heavy duty application, this paper studied the dual loop EGR effects on the retrofit applications of heavy duty diesel for delivery and drayage applications. The reduction of NOx emissions and the impact on fuel economy and controls are discussed.

The aim of this paper is to compile the state of the art of engine control and develop scenarios for improvements in a number of applications of engine control where the pace of technology change is at its most marked. The first application is control of downsized engines with enhancement of combustion using direct injection, variable valve actuation and turbo charging. The second application is electrification of the powertrain with its impact on engine control. Various architectures are explored such as micro, mild, full hybrid and range extenders. The third application is exhaust gas after-treatment, with a focus on the trade-off between engine and after-treatment control. The fourth application is implementation of powertrain control systems, hardware, software, methods, and tools. The paper summarizes several examples where the performance depends on the availability of control systems for automotive applications.

HCCI/PCCI combustion concepts have been demonstrated for both high brake thermal efficiency and low engine-out emissions. However, these advanced combustion concepts still could not be fully utilized partially due to the limitations of conventional fixed spray angle nozzle designs for issues related to wall wetting for early injections. The micro-variable circular orifice (MVCO) fuel injector provides variable spray angles, variable orifice areas, and variable spray patterns. The MVCO provides optimized spray patterns to minimize combustion chamber surface-wetting, oil dilution and emissions. Designed with a concise structure, MVCO can significantly extend the operation maps of high efficiency early HCCI/PCCI combustion, and enable optimization of a dual-mode HCCI/PCCI and Accelerated Diffusion Combustion (ADC) over full engine operating maps. The MVCO variable spray pattern characteristics are analyzed with high speed photographing.

This paper describes a CFD modeling based approach to address design challenges in GDI (gasoline direct injection) engine combustion system development. A Ford in-house developed CFD code MESIM (Multi-dimensional Engine Simulation) was applied to the study. Gasoline fuel is multi-component in nature and behaves very differently from the single component fuel representation under various operating conditions. A multi-component fuel model has been developed and is incorporated in MESIM code. To apply the model in engine simulations, a multi-component fuel recipe that represents the vaporization characteristics of gasoline is also developed using a numerical model that simulates the ASTM D86 fuel distillation experimental procedure. The effect of the multi-component model on the fuel air mixture preparations under different engine conditions is investigated. The modeling approach is applied to guide the GDI engine piston designs.

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.

Recently, Ford Motor Company announced the introduction of EcoBoost engines in its Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles as an affordable fuel-saving option to millions of its customers. The EcoBoost engine is planned to start production in June of 2009 in the Lincoln MKS. The EcoBoost engine integrates direct fuel injection with turbocharging to significantly improve fuel economy via engine downsizing. An application of this technology bundle into a 3.5L V6 engine delivers up to 12% better drive cycle fuel economy and 15% lower emissions with comparable torque and power as a 5.4L V8 PFI engine. Combustion system performance is key to the success of the EcoBoost engine. A systematic methodology has been employed to develop the EcoBoost engine combustion system.

An investigation was performed to identify the benefits of cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) when applied to a potential ethanol flexible fuelled vehicle (eFFV) engine. The fuels investigated in this study represented the range a flex-fuel engine may be exposed to in the United States; from 85% ethanol/gasoline blend (E85) to regular gasoline. The test engine was a 2.0-L in-line 4 cylinder that was turbocharged and port fuel injected (PFI). Ethanol blended fuels, including E85, have a higher octane rating and produce lower exhaust temperatures compared to gasoline. EGR has also been shown to decrease engine knock tendency and decrease exhaust temperatures. A natural progression was to take advantage of the superior combustion characteristics of E85 (i.e. increase compression ratio), and then employ EGR to maintain performance with gasoline. When EGR alone could not provide the necessary knock margin, hydrogen (H2) was added to simulate an onboard fuel reformer.

Parallel computing schemes were developed to enhance the computational efficiency of engine spray simulations with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). Spray simulations have been shown to be grid dependent and thus fine mesh is often used to improve solution accuracy. In this study, dynamic mesh refinement adaptive to spray region was developed and parallelized in KIVA-4. The change of cell and node numbers and the local characteristics in the dynamic mesh refinement posed difficulties in developing efficient parallel computing schemes to achieve low communication overhead and good load balance. The present strategy executed AMR on one processor with data scattering among processors following the adaptation, and performed AMR every ten computational timesteps for enhanced parallel performance. The re-initialization was required and performed at the minimized cost.

The use of high levels of EGR has been documented to increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions of spark ignition engines [1–5]. However, these engines typically face challenges in EGR control and tolerance, which can reduce the expected efficiency improvement. A concept developed by Southwest Research Institute explores the potential of an engine with individual cylinders dedicated to EGR production to overcome the challenges associated with EGR tolerance and control. In this study, a 4-cylinder engine was run with cylinder 1 exhausting directly to the intake manifold, leading to a constant 25% EGR level. The engine was run naturally aspirated over a large portion of the performance map at an ultra-high (14:1) compression ratio. As a part of the study, air-to-fuel ratio in cylinder 1 was varied from stoichiometric to rich to determine the effect of the products of partial combustion on EGR tolerance and fuel consumption.

In-cylinder emission controls were the focus for diesel engines for many decades before the emergence of diesel aftertreatment. Even with modern aftertreatment, control of in-cylinder processes remains a key issue for developing diesel vehicles with low tailpipe emissions. A reduction in in-cylinder emissions makes aftertreatment more effective at lower cost with superior fuel economy. This paper describes a study focused on an in-cylinder combustion control approach using a Delphi E3 flexible fuel system to achieve low engine-out NOx and PM emissions. A 2003 model year Detroit Diesel Corporation Series 60 14L heady-duty diesel engine, modified to accept the Delphi E3 unit injectors, and ultra low sulfur fuel were used throughout this study. The process of achieving premixed low temperature combustion within the limited range of parameters of the stock ECU was investigated.