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Accurate control of both the timing and quantity of injection events is critical for engine performance and emissions. The most serious problem which reduces the accuracy of the control operation in such systems is a time delay of the responsiveness for the opening and closing operation of the electromagnetic valve. Modern electronic control systems should be capable of driving high speed solenoid injectors at a very fast switch frequency with high efficiency and acceptable power requirements. In this paper, the dynamic characteristic of a high speed servo-hydraulic solenoid injector for diesel engine, with different driving circuits and control methods, is investigated. A pre-energizing control strategy based on a dual power supply is applied to speed up the opening response time of the injectors.

In this paper, a low-speed pre-ignition (LSPI) diagnostic strategy is designed based on the ion current signal. Novel diagnostic and re-injection strategies are proposed to suppress super-knock induced by pre-ignition within the detected combustion cycle. A parallel controller system that integrates a regular engine control unit (ECU) and CompactRIO (cRIO) from National Instruments (NI) is employed. Based on this system, the diagnostic and suppression strategy can be implemented without any adaptions to the regular ECU. Experiments are conducted on a 1.5-liter four-cylinder, turbocharged, direct-injected gasoline engine. The experimental results show two kinds of pre-ignition, one occurs spontaneously, and the other is induced by carbon deposits. Carbon deposits on the spark plug can strongly interfere with the ion current signal. By applying the ion current signal, approximately 14.3% of spontaneous and 90% of carbon induced pre-ignition cycles can be detected.

Advanced combustion engines dominate all automotive applications. Future high efficiency clean combustion engines can contribute significantly to sustainable transportation. Effective ignition strategies are studied to enable lean and diluted combustion under considerably high-density mixture and strong turbulences, for improving the efficiency and emissions of future combustion engines. Continuous discharge and multi-site ignition strategies have been proved to be effective to stabilize the combustion process under lean and EGR diluted conditions. Continuous discharge strategy uses a traditional sparkplug with a single spark gap and multiple ignition coil packs. The ignition coil packs operate under a specific time offset to realize a continuous discharge process with a prolonged discharge duration. Multi-site ignition strategy also uses multiple ignition coil packs.

The present work proposed to implement oxy-fuel combustion mode into a homogeneous charge compression ignition engine to reduce complexity in engine emissions after-treatment and lower carbon dioxide emission. The combination of oxy-fuel combustion mode with homogeneous charge compression ignition engine can be further optimized by the utilization of direct high temperature and pressure water injection to improve cycle performance. A retrofitted conventional diesel engine coupled with port fuel injection and direct water injection is utilized in this study. A self-designed oxygen and carbon dioxide mixture intake system with flexible oxygen fraction adjustment ability is implemented in the test bench to simulate the adoption of exhaust gas recirculation. Water injection system is directly installed in the combustion chamber with a modified high speed solenoid diesel injector.

Downsizing gasoline direct injection engine with turbo boost technology is the main trend for gasoline engine. However, with engine downsizing and ever increasing of power output, a new abnormal phenomenon, known as pre-ignition or super knock, occurs in turbocharged engines. Pre-ignition will cause very high in-cylinder pressure and high oscillations. In some circumstances, one cycle of severe pre-ignition may damage the piston or spark plug, which has a severe influence on engine performance and service life. So pre-ignition has raised lots of attention in both industry and academic society. More and more studies reveal that the auto-ignition of lubricants is the potential source for pre-ignition. The auto-ignition characteristics of different lubricants are studied. This paper focuses on the ignition delay of different lubricants in Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) combustion system.

With the increasing worldwide concern on environmental pollution, battery electrical vehicles (BEV) have attracted a lot attention. However, it still couldn’t satisfy the market requirements because of the low battery power density, high cost and long charging time. The range-extended electrical vehicle (REEV) got more attention because it could avoid the mileage anxiety of the BEVs with lower cost and potentially higher efficiency. When internal combustion engine (ICE) works as the power source of range extender (RE) for REEV, its NVH, emissions in starting process need to be optimized. In this paper, a 2-cylinder PFI gasoline engine and a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) are coaxially connected. Meanwhile, batteries and load systems were equipped. The RE co-control system was developed based on Compact RIO (Compact Reconfigurable IO), Labview and motor control unit (MCU).

For internal combustion engine systems, lean and diluted combustion is an important technology applied for fuel efficiency improvement. Because of the thermodynamic boundary conditions and the presence of in-cylinder flow, the development of a well-sustained flame kernel for lean combustion is a challenging task. Reliable spark discharge with the addition of enhanced delivered energy is thus needed at certain time durations to achieve successful combustion initiation of the lean air-fuel mixture. For a conventional transistor coil ignition system, only limited amount of energy is stored in the ignition coil. Therefore, both the energy of the spark discharge and the duration of the spark discharge are bounded. To break through the energy limit of the conventional transistor coil ignition system, in this work, an adaptive spark ignition system is introduced. The system has the ability to reconstruct the conductive ion channels whenever it is interrupted during the spark discharge.

In this study, a spray hot-impingement system was set up to analyze the spray characteristics when spray impinged onto a flat hot surface by high-speed photography technology. The angle between spray axis and normal line of the flat surface could be changed, and the surface temperature could exceed 400°C. The influences of surface temperature and heating power on spray atomization were investigated too. At atmospheric pressure, when the wall temperature was 340∼380°C, the impinging diesel spray was well atomized. In this experiment, the wall heating power could be set at 1∼25 Wcm-2. When the heating power was about 1.6 Wcm-2, the impinging spray atomized well, and when it was about 10.1 Wcm-2 the spray atomized better though the heating power requirement should be high.

The present work discusses a novel oxy-fuel combustion cycle utilized in compression ignition internal combustion engine. The most prominent feature of this cycle is that the air intake is replaced by oxygen; therefore nitric oxide (NOX) emission is eliminated. The enrichment of oxygen leads to higher flame speed and mass fraction consumption rate; on the other hand, the high concentration of oxygen presented during combustion will result in intense pressure rise rate which may cause severe damage to engine hardware. As water injection is already utilized in gasoline engine to control knocking, the utilization of water injection in optimizing oxy-fuel combustion process has been tested in this study. To understand the relationship between water injection strategy and cycle efficiency, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were carried out. The model was carefully calibrated with the experimental results; the errors were controlled within 3%.

A Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) Combustor enables the investigation of stabilization mechanisms in an environment that decouples the turbulent chemical kinetics from the complex recirculating flow. Previous studies on combustion of the low-pressure fuel jets in the Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) showed non-linear effect of coflow temperature on autoignition delay and the randomness of autoignition sites. In this work, a diesel spray is injected into the CATA with the injection pressure at 20MPa from a single-hole injector and the autoignition and combustion process of the spray is recorded by a high-speed camera video. The multipoint autoignition of diesel spray is observed in the CATA and the subsequent combustion process is analyzed. The results show that autoignition phenomenon plays an important role in the stabilization of the lifted flames of diesel spray under low coflow temperature.

By changing the top-land radial clearance, this paper presents the effect of the piston crevice on the transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle. At the same time, the transient cylinder pressure and instantaneous crankshaft speed of the engine were measured and recorded. The results show that increasing 50% crevice volume leads to 25% increase of HC emissions in the lean region and 18% increase of HC emissions in the rich region, however, the 50% increase of crevice volume contributes to 32% decease of HC emissions in the stable combustion region. For LPG SI engine, the HC emissions of the first firing cycle during cold start are relatively low in a wide range of the excess air ratio.

The effectiveness of after-treatment systems depends on the exhaust gas temperature, which is low during cold-start. As a result, Euro III, Euro IV and FTP75 require that the emissions tests include exhaust from the beginning of cold start. It is proved that 50%∼80% of HC and CO emissions are emitted during the cold start and the amount of unburned fuel from the crevices during starting is much higher than that under warmed engine conditions. The piston crevices is the most part of combustion chamber crevices, and results of mathematical simulations show that the piston crevice contribution to HC emissions is expected to increase during cold engine operation. Based on the transient HC test data and the double zone combustion model, this paper presents the study of the crevice HC Mechanism of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle.

The active components, such as OH and their concentrations in the coflow, have a strong effect on the combustion process of diesel fuel spray flames in the Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA), which then will affect the soot incandescence of the spray flames. CO2 and H2O2, the additives which have contrary effect on the concentration of the active components, were mixed separately into the thermo-atmosphere before the jet spray were issued into the coflow, which changed the boundary condition around the central jet and influenced the combustion characteristics and soot incandescence. The combustion characteristics such as ignition delay and flame liftoff height of the central spray flames are measured and the linkage between these two parameters is investigated at different coflow temperatures.

The transient characteristics of combustion and emissions during the engine start up at different higher cranking speeds for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications were presented in this paper. Cycle-by-cycle analysis was done for each start up case. Intake air mass during the first several cycles decrease as the engine was cranked at higher speed. Ignition timing is delayed with higher cranking speed, which leads to an increase of exhaust temperature. For various start up cases, similar quantity of fuel is injected at the first cycle, but the ignition timing is significantly delayed to meet the acceleration requirement when cranking speed enhanced. Because of the deterioration of intake charge, the air-fuel mixture is over-enriched in the first several cycles for the cases at higher cranking speed. With cranking speed is increased, the in-cylinder residual gas fraction rises, which leads to poor combustion and decrease of mass fraction of burned fuel.

In this paper a method of misfiring control in current cycle at engine start is presented. With this novel method, the high HC emissions of gasoline engine employed in traditional or hybrid electrical vehicles will be avoided. By the feedback of ion current signal, misfire phenomenon is identified within 30 degrees crank angle after spark plug ignited. Then, the ignition coil will be recharged and the plug sparked again to promote air fuel mixture oxidation and deplete the unburned hydrocarbon produces in exhaust gas. On the other hand, too late ignition will not always result in normal combustion, a kind of reaction similar with slow oxidation also occurs in such case.

This paper presents the simulation of in-cylinder stratified mixture formation, spray motion, combustion and emissions in a four-stroke and four valves direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine with a pent-roof combustion chamber by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The Extended Coherent Flame Combustion Model (ECFM), implemented in the AVL-Fire codes, was employed. The key parameters of spray characteristics related to computing settings, such as skew angle, cone angle and flow per pulse width with experimental measurements were compared. The numerical analysis is mainly focused on how the tumble flow ratio and geometry of piston bowls affect the motion of charge/spray in-cylinder, the formation of stratified mixture and the combustion and emissions (NO and CO₂) for the wall-guided stratified-charge spark-ignition DISI engine.

In this paper, based on the plug-in series hybrid electric vehicle development project, the vehicle technology solutions and the match of power system parameters were analyzed. The vehicle control strategies were identified and optimized according to plug-in hybrid vehicle features. The plug-in series hybrid, rule-based logic threshold switching control strategy, charge depleting (CD) mode and charge-sustaining (CS) mode are chosen according to the key factors, such as the environment, performance requirements, technical requirements and cost. And then the structure and model of vehicle control strategy were established to carry out vehicle energy management and power system control. The parameter selection, electric drive system matching, energy storage system design based on the requirement of vehicle performance, system architecture and control strategy are presented.

This paper presents the development of an electronic control LPG gas injection system and its application in a small SI engine. The tests results show that the developed LPG gas injection system can meet the needs for the goal of high engine power output and low exhaust emissions based on the engine bench tests. With the LPG electronic gas injection system, the air-fuel ratio can be optimized based on the requirements and CO and NOx emission levels are decreased significantly compared with the LPG mechanical mixer fuel supply system, based on the same HC emission levels. With the new gas phase LPG electronic control injection system, the HC emission level is controlled below the 300 ppm under most engine conditions and under 200 ppm when the engine speed is over 3000 r/min. The NOx emission level is under 2600 ppm in the whole range of engine operation conditions and is decreased by 2000 ppm compared with the LPG mechanical mixer system.

This paper presents an experimental study of the emission characteristics of a small Spark-Ignited, LPG engine. A single cylinder, four-stroke, water-cooled, 125cc SI engine for motorcycle is modified for using LPG fuel. The power output of LPG is above 95% power output of gasoline. The emission characteristics of LPG are compared with the gasoline. The test result shows that LPG for small SI engine will help to reduce the emission level of motorcycles. The HC and CO emission level can be reduced greatly, but NOx emissions are increased. The emission of motorcycle using LPG shows the potential to meet the more strict regulation.

In order to investigate the impacts of recirculated exhaust gas temperature on gasoline engine combustion and emissions, an experimental study has been conducted on a turbocharged PFI gasoline engine. The engine was equipped with a high pressure cooled EGR system, in which different EGR temperatures were realized by using different EGR coolants. The engine ran at 2000 r/min and 3000 r/min, and the BMEP varied from 0.2MPa to 1.0MPa with the step of 0.2MPa. At each case, there were three conditions: 0% EGR, 10% LT-EGR, 10% HT-EGR. The results indicated that LT-EGR had a longer combustion duration compared with HT-EGR. When BMEP was 1.0 MPa, CA50 of HT-EGR advanced about 5oCA. However, CA50 of LT-EGR could still keep steady and in appropriate range, which guaranteed good combustion efficiency. Besides, LT-EGR had lower exhaust gas temperature, which could help to suppress knock. And its lower exhaust gas temperature could reduce heat loss. These contributed to fuel consumption reduction.