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This work examines the effect of valve timing during cold crank-start and cold fast-idle (1200 rpm, 2 bar NIMEP) on the emissions of hydrocarbons (HC) and particulate mass and number (PM/PN). Four different cam-phaser configurations are studied in detail: 1. Baseline stock valve timing. 2. Late intake opening/closing. 3. Early exhaust opening/closing. 4. Late intake phasing combined with early exhaust phasing. Delaying the intake valve opening improves the mixture formation process and results in more than 25% reduction of the HC and of the PM/PN emissions during cold crank-start. Early exhaust valve phasing results in a deterioration of the HC and PM/PN emissions performance during cold crank-start. Nevertheless, early exhaust valve phasing slightly improves the HC emissions and substantially reduces the particulate emissions at cold fast-idle.

This article reports on the potential of negative valve overlap (NVO) for improving the net indicated thermal efficiency (η NIMEP) of gasoline engines during part load. Three fixed fuel flow rates, resulting in indicated mean effective pressures of up to 6 bar, were investigated. At low load, NVO significantly reduces the pumping loses during the gas exchange loop, achieving up to 7% improvement in indicated efficiency compared to the baseline. Similar efficiency improvements are achieved by positive valve overlap (PVO), with the disadvantage of worse combustion stability from a higher residual gas fraction (xr). As the load increases, achieving the wide-open throttle limit, the benefits of NVO for reducing the pumping losses diminish, while the blowdown losses from early exhaust valve opening (EVO) increase.

The effect on the intake flow field, air fuel mixing processes, thermodynamic performance and emissions output has been investigated for a range of valve operating profiles. A standard speed load point of 2000 rpm and 2.7 bar IMEP720° has been reached by throttling the intake whilst running standard cam profiles, by early closing of both inlet valves (EIVC) and by early closing of each inlet individually to generate bulk swirl motions within the cylinder. Data has been recorded at stoichiometric air fuel ratios for both direct injection and port fuelled operation. The valve profiles have been applied to two single cylinder homogeneous gasoline direct injection (GDI) spark ignition engines, developed to investigate the potential of controlling engine load by limiting the inducted air mass using fully variable valve timing (FVVT) to reduce pumping losses at part load.

The presence of liquid fuel inside the engine cylinder is believed to be a strong contributor to the high levels of hydrocarbon emissions from spark ignition (SI) engines during the warm-up period. Quantifying and determining the fate of the liquid fuel that enters the cylinder is the first step in understanding the process of emissions formation. This work uses planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) to visualize the liquid fuel present in the cylinder. The fluorescing compounds in indolene, and mixtures of iso-octane with dopants of different boiling points (acetone and 3-pentanone) were used to trace the behavior of different volatility components. Images were taken of three different planes through the engine intersecting the intake valve region. A closed valve fuel injection strategy was used, as this is the strategy most commonly used in practice. Background subtraction and masking were both performed to reduce the effect of any spurious fluorescence.

An arrangement of port - injected, stratified-charge, 4 - valve SI engine is proposed, in which fuel is injected in a thin column from an injector which is angled so that the fuel is deflected by one of the inlet valves onto the combustion chamber surface, at a position close to the central spark plug. The injection takes place towards the end of the induction stroke, and the injector is mounted to the side of one of the intake ports. The second intake port is deactivated at part load to establish an axial swirling motion to stabilise the fuel evaporating from the warm combustion chamber surface. Testing has been performed on a single - cylinder research engine to assess the extent of the stratification by measuring pre - flame hydrocarbon concentrations at various positions around the combustion chamber.

The fuel injection process in the port of a firing 4-valve SI engine at part load and 25°C head temperature was observed by a high speed video camera. Fuel was injected when the valve was closed. The reverse blow-down flow when the intake valve opens has been identified as an important factor in the mixture preparation process because it not only alters the thermal environment of the intake port, but also strip-atomizes the liquid film at the vicinity of the intake valve and carries the droplets away from the engine. In a series of “fuel-on” experiments, the fuel injected in the current cycle was observed to influence the fuel delivery to the engine in the subsequent cycles.

In order to understand how unburned hydrocarbons emerge from SI engines and, in particular, how non-fuel hydrocarbons are formed and oxidized, a new gas sampling technique has been developed. A sampling unit, based on a combination of techniques used in the Fast Flame Ionization Detector (FFID) and wall-mounted sampling valves, was designed and built to capture a sample of exhaust gas during a specific period of the exhaust process and from a specific location within the exhaust port. The sampling unit consists of a transfer tube with one end in the exhaust port and the other connected to a three-way valve that leads, on one side, to a FFID and, on the other, to a vacuum chamber with a high-speed solenoid valve. Exhaust gas, drawn by the pressure drop into the vacuum chamber, impinges on the face of the solenoid valve and flows radially outward.

A Lagrangian random vortex-boundary element method has been developed for the simulation of unsteady incompressible flow inside three-dimensional domains with time-dependent boundaries, similar to IC engines. The solution method is entirely grid-free in the fluid domain and eliminates the difficult task of volumetric meshing of the complex engine geometry. Furthermore, due to the Lagrangian evaluation of the convective processes, numerical viscosity is virtually removed; thus permitting the direct simulation of flow at high Reynolds numbers. In this paper, a brief description of the numerical methodology is given, followed by an example of induction flow in an off-centered port-cylinder assembly with a harmonically driven piston and a valve seat situated directly below the port. The predicted flow is shown to resemble the flow visualization results of a laboratory experiment, despite the crude approximation used to represent the geometry.

The occurrence of liquid fuel in the cylinder of automotive internal combustion engines is believed to be an important source of exhaust hydrocarbon (HC) emissions, especially during the warm-up process following an engine start up. In this study a Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) has been used in a transparent flow visualization combustion engine in order to investigate the phenomena which govern the transport of liquid fuel into the cylinder during a simulated engine start up process. Using indolene fuel, the engine was started up from room temperature and run for 90 sec on each start up simulation. The size and velocity of the liquid fuel droplets entering the cylinder were measured as a function of time and crank angle position during these start up processes. The square-piston transparent engine used gave full optical access to the cylinder head region, so that these droplet characteristics could be measured in the immediate vicinity of the intake valve.

Rotary valves should pose a credible threat to other mechanical valve systems-such as poppet valves-but they have been unable to infiltrate the automotive market. Using Axiomatic Design we have identified significant design problems with existing rotary valves which have prevented their wide-spread use. In addition, we have proposed an innovative solution which removes some couplings in existing rotary valve systems and could potentially be used in automotive applications, although further work must still be performed.

Mechanisms exist to vary valve lift, duration and phasing either simultaneously or individually but it remains a challenge to find the optimum settings. An experimental investigation involving a statistical approach has been applied to a 4-litre, 90° vee-8, 4-valve engine in which intake valve lift, duration and phasing were chosen as variables along with exhaust valve phasing. The intake valves were operated symmetrically for the first phase of testing, but subsequently asymmetric operation was also investigated. The results indicated possible strategies that could be applied to reduce emissions.

Intake valve thermal behavior was observed across a wide range of operating conditions while running an engine on both propane and gasoline. Compared to the gaseous fuel, the liquid fuel operation has cooler valve temperatures (∼50-100C difference) and there is significant temperature gradient across the valve surface due to liquid fuel impinging on the front quadrant of the valve. The valve warm-up time is largely determined by the effective thermal inertia of the valve (∼valve body plus 1/3 of stem mass) and the thermal resistance to the seat. The valve is heated up by the combustion chamber; the dominant cooling paths are through the seat contact and the liquid fuel evaporation. Just after starting, very little fuel evaporates from the cold valve until there is a substantial increase in valve temperature in a period of approximately 10-20 seconds.

The liquid fuel entry into the cylinder and its subsequent behavior through the combustion cycle were observed by a high speed CCD camera in a transparent engine. The videos were taken with the engine firing under cold conditions in a simulated start-up process, at 1,000 RPM and intake manifold pressure of 0.5 bar. The variables examined were the injector geometry, injector type (normal and air-assisted), injection timing (open- and closed-valve injection), and injected air-to-fuel ratios. The visualization results show several important and unexpected features of the in-cylinder fuel behavior: 1) strip-atomization of the fuel film by the intake flow; 2) squeezing of fuel film between the intake valve and valve seat at valve closing to form large droplets; 3)deposition of liquid fuel as films distributed on the intake valve and head region. Some of the liquid fuel survives combustion into the next cycle.