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The incorporation of detailed chemistry models in internal combustion engine simulations is becoming mandatory as local, globally lean, low-temperature combustion strategies are setting the path towards a more efficient and environmentally sustainable use of energy resources in transportation. In this paper, we assessed the computational efficiency of a recently developed sparse analytical Jacobian chemistry solver, namely ‘SpeedCHEM’, that features both direct and Krylov-subspace solution methods for maximum efficiency for both small and large mechanism sizes. The code was coupled with a high-dimensional clustering algorithm for grouping homogeneous reactors into clusters with similar states and reactivities, to speed-up the chemical kinetics solution in multi-dimensional combustion simulations.

The tradeoff between NOx emissions and combustion instability in an engine operating in the dual-fuel Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition (RCCI) combustion mode was investigated using a combination of engine experiments and detailed CFD modeling. Experiments were performed on a single cylinder version of a General Motors/Fiat JTD 1.9L four-cylinder diesel engine. Gasoline was injected far upstream of the intake valve using an air assisted injector and fuel vaporization system and diesel was injected directly into the cylinder using a common rail injector. The timing of the diesel injection was swept from −70° ATDC to −20° ATDC while the gasoline percentage was adjusted to hold the average combustion phasing (CA50) and load (IMEPg) constant at 0.5° ATDC and 7 bar, respectively. At each operating point the variation in IMEP, peak PRR, and CA50 was calculated from the measured cylinder pressure trace and NOx, CO, soot and UHC were recorded.

The rapid increase in the sophistication of vehicle automation demands development of evaluation protocols tuned to understanding driver-automation interaction. Driving simulators provide a safe and cost-efficient tool for studying driver-automation interaction, and this paper outlines general considerations for simulator-based evaluation protocols. Several challenges confront automation evaluation, including the limited utility of standard measures of driver performance (e.g., standard deviation of lane position), and the need to quantify underlying mental processes associated with situation awareness and trust. Implicitly or explicitly vehicle automation encourages drivers to disengage from driving and engage in other activities. Thus secondary tasks play an important role in both creating representative situations for automation use and misuse, as well as providing embedded measures of driver engagement.

Computational fluid dynamics of gas-fueled large-bore spark ignition engines with pre-chamber ignition can speed up the design process of these engines provided that 1) the reliability of the results is not affected by poor meshing and 2) the time cost of the meshing process does not negatively compensate for the advantages of running a computer simulation. In this work a flame propagation model that runs with arbitrary hybrid meshes was developed and coupled with the KIVA4-MHI CFD solver, in order to address these aims. The solver follows the G-Equation level-set method for turbulent flame propagation by Tan and Reitz, and employs improved numerics to handle meshes featuring different cell types such as hexahedra, tetrahedra, square pyramids and triangular prisms. Detailed reaction kinetics from the SpeedCHEM solver are used to compute the non-equilibrium composition evolution downstream and upstream of the flame surface, where chemical equilibrium is instead assumed.

The 4th Workshop of the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) was held September 5-6, 2015 in Kyoto, Japan. This manuscript presents a summary of the progress in experiments and modeling among ECN contributors leading to a better understanding of soot formation under the ECN “Spray A” configuration and some parametric variants. Relevant published and unpublished work from prior ECN workshops is reviewed. Experiments measuring soot particle size and morphology, soot volume fraction (fv), and transient soot mass have been conducted at various international institutions providing target data for improvements to computational models. Multiple modeling contributions using both the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) Equations approach and the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) approach have been submitted. Among these, various chemical mechanisms, soot models, and turbulence-chemistry interaction (TCI) methodologies have been considered.

This paper investigates flow and combustion in a full-cycle simulation of a four-stroke, three-valve HCCI engine by visualizing the flow with pathlines. Pathlines trace massless particles in a transient flow field. In addition to visualization, pathlines are used here to trace the history, or evolution, of flow fields and species. In this study evolution is followed from the intake port through combustion. Pathline analysis follows packets of intake charge in time and space from induction through combustion. The local scalar fields traversed by the individual packets in terms of velocity magnitude, turbulence, species concentration and temperatures are extracted from the simulation results. The results show how the intake event establishes local chemical and thermal environments in-cylinder and how the species respond (chemically react) to the local field.

The purpose of this research is to develop a prediction technique that can be used in the development of port fuel-injection (hereinafter called PFI) gasoline engines, especially for general purpose small utility engines. Utility engines have two contradictory desirable aspects: compactness and high-power at wide open throttle. Therefore, applying the port fuel injector to utility engines presents a unique intractableness that is different from application to automobiles or motorcycles. At the condition of wide open throttle, a large amount of fuel is required to output high power, and injected fuel is deposited as a wall film on the intake port wall. Despite the fuel rich condition, emissions are required to be kept under a certain level. Thus, it is significant to understand the wall film phenomenon and control film thickness in the intake ports.

An investigation of high speed direct injection (DI) compression ignition (CI) engine combustion fueled with gasoline injected using a triple-pulse strategy in the low temperature combustion (LTC) regime is presented. This work aims to extend the operation ranges for a light-duty diesel engine, operating on gasoline, that have been identified in previous work via extended controllability of the injection process. The single-cylinder engine (SCE) was operated at full load (16 bar IMEP, 2500 rev/min) and computational simulations of the in-cylinder processes were performed using a multi-dimensional CFD code, KIVA-ERC-Chemkin, that features improved sub-models and the Chemkin library. The oxidation chemistry of the fuel was calculated using a reduced mechanism for primary reference fuel combustion chosen to match ignition characteristics of the gasoline fuel used for the SCE experiments.

The focus of this paper is to discuss the modeling and control of intake plenum pressure on the Powertrain Control Research Laboratory's (PCRL) Single-Cylinder Engine (SCE) transient test system using a patented device known as the Intake Air Simulator (IAS), which dynamically controls the intake plenum pressure, and, subsequently, the instantaneous airflow into the cylinder. The IAS exists as just one of many devices that the PCRL uses to control the dynamic boundary conditions of its SCE transient test system to make it “think” and operate as though it were part of a Multi-Cylinder Engine (MCE) test system. The model described in this paper will be used to design a second generation of this device that utilizes both continuously and discretely actuating valves working in parallel.

There is significant potential for connected and autonomous vehicles to impact vehicle efficiency, fuel economy, and emissions, especially for hybrid-electric vehicles. These improvements could have large-scale impact on oil consumption and air-quality if deployed in large Mobility-as-a-Service or ride-sharing fleets. As part of the US Department of Energy's current Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVCT), EcoCAR: The Mobility Challenge, Mississippi State University’s EcoCAR Team is redesigning and doing the development work necessary to convert a conventional gasoline spark-ignited 2019 Chevy Blazer into a hybrid-electric vehicle with SAE Level 2 autonomy. The target consumer segments for this effort are the Mobility-as-a-Service fleet owners, operators and riders. To accomplish this conversion, the MSU team is implementing a P4 mild hybridization strategy that is expected to result in a 30% increase in fuel economy over the stock Blazer.

A method for automatically generating hex-dominant meshes for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications is presented in this article. Two important regions of the mesh for any CFD simulation are the interior mesh and the boundary layer mesh. The interior mesh needs to be fine in the critical flow regions to ensure accurate solutions. The proposed method uses Bubble Mesh algorithm which packs bubbles inside the geometry to generate the mesh nodes. Algorithm was tested for sample flow problems and improvements were made to interior and boundary layer mesh generation methods. The interior mesh is generated using directionality and sizing control functions specified on the points of a 3D grid generated over the entire geometry. This offers a flexible control over mesh sizing and local mesh refinement. Boundary layer mesh is important to accurately model the physics of boundary layer near the geometry walls.

In this paper, we studied the accuracy of computational modeling of the ignition of a pilot injectionin the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) light-duty optical engine facility, using the physical properties of a cetane/iso-cetane Diesel Primary Reference Fuel (DPRF) mixture and the reaction kinetics of a well-validated mechanism for primary reference fuels. Local fuel-air equivalence ratio measurements from fuel tracer based planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) experiments were used to compare the mixture formation predictions with KIVA-ERC-based simulations. The effects of variations in injection mass from 1 mg to 4 mg, in-cylinder swirl ratio, and near-TDC temperatures on non-combusting mixture preparation were analyzed, to assess the accuracy of the model in capturing average jet behavior, despite its inability to model the non-negligible jet-by-jet variations seen in the experiments.

In multidimensional modeling, fuels have been represented predominantly by single components, such as octane for gasoline. Several bicomponent studies have been performed, but these are still limited in their ability to represent real fuels, which are blends of as many as 300 components. This study outlines a method by which the fuel composition is represented by a distribution function of the fuel molecular weight. This allows a much wider range of compositions to be modeled, and only requires including two additional “species” besides the fuel, namely the mean and second moment of the distribution. This approach has been previously presented but is applied here to multidimensional calculations. Results are presented for single component droplet vaporization for comparison with single component fuel predictions, as well as results for a multicomponent gasoline and a diesel droplet.

The use of virtual prototyping early in the design stage of a product has gained popularity due to reduced cost and time to market. The state of the art in vehicle simulation has reached a level where full vehicles are analyzed through simulation but major difficulties continue to be present in interfacing the vehicle model with accurate powertrain models and in developing adequate formulations for the contact between tire and terrain (specifically, scenarios such as tire sliding on ice and rolling on sand or other very deformable surfaces). The proposed work focuses on developing a ground vehicle simulation capability by combining several third party packages for vehicle simulation, tire simulation, and powertrain simulation. The long-term goal of this project consists in promoting the Digital Car idea through the development of a reliable and robust simulation capability that will enhance the understanding and control of off-road vehicle performance.

The role of mixture stratification on combustion rate has been investigated in a constant volume combustion vessel in which mixtures of different equivalence ratios can be added in a spatially and temporally controlled fashion. The experiments were performed in a regime of low fluid motion to avoid the complicating effects of turbulence generated by the injection of different masses of fluid. Different mixture combinations were investigated while maintaining a constant overall equivalence ratio and initial pressure. The results indicate that the highest combustion rate for an overall lean mixture is obtained when all of the fuel is contained in a stoichiometric mixture in the vicinity of the ignition source. This is the result of the high burning velocity of these mixtures, and the complete oxidation which releases the full chemical energy.

A modular and scalable Dense Medium Plasma Water Purification Reactor was developed, which uses atmospheric-pressure electrical discharges under water to generate highly reactive species to break down organic contaminants and microorganisms. Key benefits of this novel technology include: (i) extremely high efficiency in both decontamination and disinfection; (ii) operating continuously at ambient temperature and pressure; (iii) reducing demands on the containment vessel; and (iv) requiring no consumables. This plasma based technology was developed to replace the catalytic reactor being used in the planned International Space Station Water Processor Assembly.

Powertrain simulation is becoming an increasingly valuable tool to evaluate new technologies proposed for future military vehicles. The powertrain of the M1A1 Abrams tank is currently being modeled in the Powertrain Control Research Laboratory (PCRL) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This powertrain model is to be integrated with other component models in an effort to produce a high fidelity simulation of the entire vehicle.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Snowmobile Team designed and constructed a hybrid-electric snowmobile for the 2005 Society of Automotive Engineers' Clean Snowmobile Challenge. Built on a 2003 cross-country touring chassis, this machine features a 784 cc fuel-injected four-stroke engine in parallel with a 48 V electric golf cart motor. The 12 kg electric motor increases powertrain torque up to 25% during acceleration and recharges the snowmobile's battery pack during steady-state operation. Air pollution from the gasoline engine is reduced to levels far below current best available technology in the snowmobile industry. The four-stroke engine's closed-loop EFI system maintains stoichiometric combustion while dual three-way catalysts reduce NOx, HC and CO emissions by up to 94% from stock. In addition to the use of three way catalysts, the fuel injection strategy has been modified to further reduce engine emissions from the levels measured in the CSC 2004 competition.

In this paper, knock in a Ford single cylinder direct-injection spark-ignition (DISI) engine was modeled and investigated using the KIVA-3V code with a G-equation combustion model coupled with detailed chemical kinetics. The deflagrative turbulent flame propagation was described by the G-equation combustion model. A 22-species, 42-reaction iso-octane (iC8H18) mechanism was adopted to model the auto-ignition process of the gasoline/air/residual-gas mixture ahead of the flame front. The iso-octane mechanism was originally validated by ignition delay tests in a rapid compression machine. In this study, the mechanism was tested by comparing the simulated ignition delay time in a constant volume mesh with the values measured in a shock tube under different initial temperature, pressure and equivalence ratio conditions, and acceptable agreements were obtained.

A global optimization method has been developed for an engine simulation code and utilized in the search of optimal fuel injection strategies. This method uses a Lagrange interpolation function which interpolates engine output data generated at the vertices and the intermediate points of the input parameters. This interpolation function is then used to find a global minimum over the entire parameter set, which in turn becomes the starting point of a CFD-based optimization. The CFD optimization is based on a steepest descent method with an adaptive cost function, where the line searches are performed with a fast-converging backtracking algorithm. The adaptive cost function is based on the penalty method, where the penalty coefficient is increased after every line search. The parameter space is normalized and, thus, the optimization occurs over the unit cube in higher-dimensional space.