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This study mainly focuses on oil consumption behavior of laser textured cylinder bores. The results of an experimental study performed on a six cylinder, 9.0 L capacity diesel engine is presented. The engine has Compacted Graphite Iron (CGI) cylinder block, and parent bore power cylinder design. Both an instantaneous oil consumption measurement method, sulfur-tracing, and a conventional oil consumption measurement method, “drain and weigh”, are used in determining the effects of different laser texture parameters at different running conditions. Oil consumption measurement results with the conventional plateau honed surface in comparison with the laser honed surface are also discussed.

There is an increasing trend in the worldwide automotive area towards developing hybrid electric vehicles as an intermediate solution to fulfill the new, more stringent pollutant emission level requirements set by governments. Conversion of braking energy into electrical energy stored in the battery through regenerative braking is an important aspect of hybrid electric vehicles that increases their fuel efficiency. This paper presents an electric regenerative power assisted brake algorithm developed to enhance energy efficiency of a front and rear wheel drive parallel hybrid electric commercial vehicle. The commercial vehicle used in this study is a second generation research prototype Ford Transit Parallel Hybrid Electric Van. The existing hydraulic brake system of this van was not altered for reasons of safety and reliability in the case of a problem with regenerative barking.

Efficient use of oil resources has become the number one priority throughout the world. Vehicles, operating with alternative fuels like solar or hydrogen energy are still in the development phase. In this transition period, automotive companies are trying to produce more efficient road vehicles to reduce the negative impacts of the internal combustion engine. Advances in high-efficiency electrical machines (EM), high-specific energy/power units, lower-cost power electronics and embedded systems have promoted the use of EM solely and/or along with the internal combustion engine (ICE) to develop pollution-free vehicles. Due to the high cost of the energy storage units for a pure electric drive the current trend is towards the practice of hybrid electric vehicle (HEVs).

Engine design is crucial in terms of NVH. It is the sources of vibration for a vehicle. Nowadays engine tends to being smaller and less stiff and more powerful according to predecessor. Small engines with high power is inherently generates extreme force and vibrations and accordingly generates more noise. Thus engine structure and also engine main components should be designed to prevent this vibration. There are two main sources: One of them is combustion and other is inertia loads. Due to this sources engine structure can cause severe vibration and accordingly this can cause noise via transmitting it into vehicle with both structure and airborne. This paper focused on to reduce engine vibration level with changing the combustion inputs such as cylinder pressure parameters and inertia parameters like piston mass, conrod length and balancing parameters. Design of experiment is used to obtain most robust case in terms of NVH.

In recent years, due to the growing problem of environmental pollution and climate change internal combustion engine stroke volume size has been reduced. The use of down-sized engines provides benefit for reducing emissions and fuel consumption especially at the inner city driving conditions. However, when the engine demands additional power, utilizing a turbocharging system is required. This study is a joint work of Istituto Motori CNR with Automotive Laboratory of Mechanical Engineering Faculty of Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and the objective of this study was devoted to increase the understanding of various engine operating conditions on emissions, especially at low load. The trade-off between Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) and Particulate Matter (PM) emissions in a Diesel engine has been examined depending on turbocharging rates and the rate of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) applied.

A method for automatic reduction of detailed reaction mechanisms using simultaneous sensitivity, reaction flow and lifetime analysis has been developed and applied to a two-zone model of an SI engine fuelled with Primary Reference Fuel (PRF). Species which are less relevant for the occurrence of autoignition in the end gas are declared redundant. They are identified and eliminated for different pre-set minimum levels of reaction flow and sensitivity. The resulting skeletal mechanism is valid in the ranges of initial and boundary values for which the analyses have been performed. A measure of species lifetime is calculated from the chemical source terms, and the species with the lifetime shorter than and mass-fraction less than specified limits are selected for removal.

For manual transmissions, including the automated types, reduced shifting effort and easy of gear set engagements in a short period of time without rattles and shakes are major requirements for the shift quality evaluations. Performance of the synchronizer mechanisms depends highly on the design, material and arrangement of the transmission synchronization components; thus, the synchronization process is a mechanical and tribological process which is influenced by numerous design parameters of the synchronizers, constraints and properties of the lubricated contacts. In this study, a detailed multi-body-dynamics model for a HCV (Heavy Commercial Vehicle) transmission gearset is presented; various synchronization simulations are performed and the results are compared with the objective shift quality measurements. The developed model yields total synchronization and engagement time based on the applied gear shifting effort.

In an effort to support design and testing activities at product development lifecycle of the engine, proper duty cycle is required. However, to collect data and develop accurate duty cycles, there are not any vehicles equipped with prototype engines at customers. Therefore, in this paper, discrete duty cycle development methodology is studied to generate trailer truck engine usage profile which represents driving conditions in Turkey for engines in development phase. Cycles are generated using several vehicles equipped with prototype engines and professional drivers that can mimic customer usage. Methodology is based on defining real-world customer driving profile, discretizing real-world drives into separate events, collecting vehicle data from each discrete drive, determining the weight of events by conducting customer surveys and creating a representative reference usage profile with data analysis.

With the advent of the KIVA-4 code which employs an unstructured mesh to represent the engine geometry, the gap in flexibility between commercial and research modeling software becomes more narrow. In this study, we tried to perform a full cycle simulation of a 4-stroke HD diesel engine represented by a highly boosted research IF (Isotta Fraschini) engine using the KIVA-4 code. The engine mesh including the combustion chamber, intake and exhaust valves and helical manifolds was constructed using optional O-Grids catching a complex geometry of the engine parts with the help of the ANSYS ICEM CFD software. The KIVA-4 mesh input was obtained by a homemade mesh converter which can read STAR-CD and CFX outputs. The simulations were performed on a full 360 deg mesh consisting of 300,000 unstructured hexahedral cells at BDC. The physical properties of the liquid fuel were taken corresponding to those of real diesel #2 oil.

A timing drive model was developed based on computer-aided simulation methods and used to calculate the contribution of each system component to the overall timing drive friction loss at various engine operating conditions. Combining the analytical results and statistical methods, an optimization study was performed to calculate the ideal system design parameters such as hydraulic tensioner spring force and flow rate, sprocket tooth profiles and circularity, and oil supply pressure. The simulation results revealed that while the plastic guide - timing chain friction is responsible for the most part of the frictional losses, the contribution of timing chain friction increases with increasing speed. It was found that the tensioner guide is the key element in the guiding system that causes friction losses. Furthermore, tensioner spring force and engine oil pressure were identified as major design parameters that influence the efficiency of the timing drive.