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Worldwide increasing energy consumption, decreasing energy resources and continuous restriction of emission legislation cause a rethinking in the development of internal combustion engines and fuels. Alternative renewable fuels, so called bio-fuels, have the potential to contribute to environmentally friendly propulsion systems. This study concentrates on the usage of alcohol fuels like ethanol, methanol and butanol in non-automotive high power engines, handheld power tools and garden equipment with the focus on mixture formation and cold start capability. Although bio-fuels have been investigated intensely for the use in automotive applications yet, the different propulsion systems and operation scenarios of nonautomotive applications raise the need for specific research. A zero dimensional vaporization model has been set up to calculate the connections between physical properties and mixture formation.

The enhancement of efficiency will play a more and more important role in the development of future (small) internal combustion engines. In recent years, the Atkinson (or Extended Expansion) cycle, realized over the crank drive, attracted increasing attention. Several OEMs have investigated this efficiency-increasing principle in the whole range from small engines up to automotive engines until now. In prior publications, the authors outlined the remarkable efficiency potentials of an Extended Expansion (EE) cycle. However, for an internal combustion engine, a smooth running performance as well as low vibrations and noise emissions are relevant aspects. This is especially true for an Extended Expansion engine realized over the crank drive. Therefore, design measures concerning friction and NVH need to be taken to enable possible series production status. Basically, these measures strongly depend on the reduction of the free mass forces and moments.

Small displacement two-stroke engines are widely used as affordable and low-maintenance propulsion systems for motorcycles, scooters, hand-held power tools and others. In recent years, considerable progress regarding emission reduction has been reached. Nevertheless, a further improvement of two-stroke engines is necessary to cover protection of health and environment. In addition, the shortage of fossil fuel resources and the anthropogenic climate change call for a sensual use of natural resources and therefore, the fuel consumption and engine efficiency needs to be improved. With the application of suitable analyses methods it is possible to find improving potential of the working processes of these engines. The thermodynamic loss analysis is a frequently applied method to examine the working process and is universally adaptable.

The main target for the development of power sport engines is and will be in future the increase of the power-to-weight ratio. However, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is getting more and more important as future legislation and increasing customer demands ask for lower fuel consumption. One possible technology for CO₂ reduction which is widely used in automotive applications is downsizing by reducing the engine capacity and increasing the specific power by charging strategies. Focusing on power sport applications, like motorcycles, the automotive downsizing technologies cannot be transferred without major modifications. The essential difference to automotive applications is the extraordinary response behavior of today's motorcycles, as well as the large engine speed spread. Additionally, packaging and cost reasons exclude the direct transfer of highly complex automotive technology, like two-stage charging, cam-phasing, etc., to motorcycle applications.

In order to fulfill future regulations regarding emissions and CO2 reduction, the small engine market inclines to migrate from carburetor systems to cleaner, more efficient electronic ignition controls and electronic fuel injection systems. When implementing such mechatronic systems in small engine applications, one has to consider specific boundary conditions like the lack of relevant sensors, limited possibilities in terms of space and of course the necessity to keep the costs as low as possible. Especially in the non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) segment, the absence of sensors makes it difficult to apply standard electronic control systems, which are based on engine related input signals provided by sensors. One engine related signal, which is even provided by the simplest engine setup, is some form of the crankshaft speed since it is essential for the functionality of the engine.

The release of the “Regulation No. 168/2013” for the approval and market surveillance of two- or three-wheel motorcycles and quadricycles of the European Union started a new challenge for the motorcycle industry. One goal of the European Union is to achieve emission parity between passenger cars (EURO 6) and motorcycles (EURO 5) in 2020. The hybridization of motorcycle powertrains is one way to achieve these strict legislation limits. In the automotive sector, hybridization is well investigated and has already shown improvements of fuel consumption, efficiency and emission behavior. Equally, motorcycle applications have a high potential to improve efficiency and to meet customer needs as fun to drive as well. This paper describes a methodical approach to analyze conventional motorcycles regarding the energy and power demand for different driving cycles and driving conditions. Therefore, a dynamic or forward vehicle simulation within MATLAB Simulink is used.

Professional users in particular will continue to rely on internal combustion engine drives in the future due to high power requirements and high daily energy consumption. Especially if they have to work in rural areas without the possibility of recharging batteries, such as in forestry or maintenance of road verges or railway lines. For these applications, it must be possible to run sustainable fuels for defossilization and drastically reduced CO2 emissions. This paper provides insights into a possible future fuel market and describes its evolution towards a more sustainable future from the perspective of a handheld equipment manufacturer. As developments in the fuel market are currently difficult to predict, manufacturers of hand-held power tools with combustion engines need to be prepared for changes in the composition of fuels that might become available on the market.

Electric driving is generally limited to short distances in an emission sensible urban environment. In the present situation with high cost electric storage and long charging duration hybridization is the key to enable electric driving. In comparison to the passenger car segment, where numerous manufacturers are already producing and offering different hybrid configurations for their premium class models, the two wheeler sector is not yet affected by this trend. The main reason for the retarded implementation of this new hybrid technology is its high system costs, as they cannot be covered by a reasonable product price. Especially for the two wheeler class L1e, with a maximum speed of 45 km/h and an engine displacement of less than 50 cm₃, the cost factor is highly important and decisive for its market acceptance, because the majority of vehicles are still low-cost products equipped with simple carbureted 2-stroke engines.

Aircraft engines in the (ELA1) category, with a maximum power of up to 100kW, are characterized by a verified state of the art technology. New developments of engine technologies and control methods are very slowly being introduced into this engine segment. This trend is based on the fact that new technologies implemented in aircraft engines must be thoroughly certified and validated in a very complex and documented procedure. For this reason, most of the engines in this class are equipped with a carburetor as an air/fuel mixture preparation system. Moreover, naturally aspirated spark ignited engines are widely used in the aircraft category, with a take-off weight of up to 1000kg.

Small combustion engines can be found in various applications in daily use (e.g. as propulsion of boats, scooters, motorbikes, power-tools, mobile power units, etc.) and have predominated these markets for a long time. Today some upcoming competitive technologies in the field of electrification can be observed and have already shown great technical advances. Therefore, small combustion engines have to keep their present advantages while concurrently minimizing their disadvantages in order to remain the predominant technology in the future. Whereas large combustion engines are most efficient thermal engines, small engines still suffer from significantly lower efficiencies caused by a disadvantageous surface to volume ratio. Thus, the enhancement of efficiency will play a key role in the development of future small combustion engines. One promising possibility to improve efficiency is the use of a longer expansion than compression stroke.

Thanks to its unsurpassed power-to-weight ratio, its low package space and low-maintenance design, the loop-scavenged two-stroke engine with conventional mixture preparation is still being used in some sectors of vehicle engineering, such as boat drives, snow mobiles and motor scooters, as well as in hand-held applications. To maintain the potential of the 2-stroke engine for the future it is necessary to take adequate steps against the system-dependent disadvantage of the simple 2-stroke engine, namely that of higher emissions compared to 4-stroke engines. One possible solution is gasoline direct injection. Its more frequent use will increase the production numbers, making it an interesting technology even in the above-mentioned cost-sensitive applications. The current report presents various concepts of direct injection in 2-stroke engines, from air-assisted injection through to high-pressure direct injection, and compares them with traditional techniques of mixture formation.

The demand for high efficiency powertrains in automotive engineering is further increasing, with hybrid powertrains being a feasible option to cope with new legislations. So far hybridization has only played a minor role for L-category vehicles. Focusing on an exemplary high-power L-category on-road vehicle, this research aims to show a new development approach, which combines longitudinal dynamic simulation (LDS) with “Design of Experiments” (DoE) in course of hybrid electric powertrain development. Furthermore, addressing the technological aspect, this paper points out how such a vehicle can benefit from 48V-hybridization of its already existing internal combustion powertrain. A fully parametric LDS model is built in Matlab/Simulink, with exchangeable powertrain components and an adaptable hybrid operation strategy. Beforehand, characterizing decisions as to focus on 48V and on parallel hybrid architecture are made.

Following the recent trend in the automotive industry, hybrid and pure electric powertrain systems are more and more preferred over conventional combustion powertrain systems due to their significant potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Although electric powertrains do not produce direct emissions during their operational time, the indirect emissions over their whole life cycle have to be taken into consideration. In this direction, the carbon footprint due to the electrification of the hand-held power tool industry needs to be examined in the preliminary design phase. In this paper, after defining the carbon footprint calculation framework, assumptions and simplifications used for the calculations, a direct comparison of the total carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) emissions of three equivalent power and range powertrain systems - a combustion-driven, a hybrid-driven, and a cordless electric-driven - is presented.

On the basis of small hybrid powertrain investigations in hand-held power tools for fuel consumption and emissions reduction, the prototype hybrid configuration of a small single-cylinder four-stroke internal combustion engine together with a brushless DC electric motor is built and measured on the testbench in terms of efficiency and emissions but also torque and power capabilities. The onboard energy storage system allows the combustion engine electrification for controlling the fuel amount and the combustion behavior while the electric motor placement instead of the pull-start and flywheel allows for start-stop of the system and load point shifting strategy for lower fuel consumption. The transient start-up results as well as the steady-state characterization maps of the system can set the limits on the fuel consumption reduction for such a hybrid tool compared with the baseline combustion-driven tool for given load cycle characteristics.

The hybrid-electric drivetrain permits a multitude of new control strategies like brake energy recuperation, engine start-stop operation, shifting of engine working point, as well as in some situations pure electric driving. Overall this typically allows a reduction of fuel consumption and therefore of carbon dioxide emissions. During the development process of the vehicle various drivetrain configurations have to be considered and compared. This includes decisions regarding the topology - like the position of the electrical machine in the drivetrain (e.g. at the gearbox input or output shaft), as well as the selection of the needed components based on their parameters (nominal power, energy content of the battery, efficiency etc.). To compare the chosen variants, typically the calculated fuel consumption for a given driving cycle is used.

The concept of a loop scavenged two-stroke engine, controlling the intake and exhaust port by the moving piston, is a proven way to realize a simple and cheap combustion engine. But without any additional control elements for the gas exchange this concept quickly reaches its limits for current emission regulations. In order to fulfil more stringent emission and fuel consumption limits with a two-stroke engine, one of the most important measures is to avoid scavenging losses of fuel and oil. Additionally, it is necessary to follow a lambda = 1 concept for a 3-way exhaust gas after-treatment. Therefore, using internal mixture preparation systems in combination with different concepts to control the gas exchange process, the two-stroke engine could become a choice for automotive applications, especially as a Range Extender in a Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV).

As the number of different engine and vehicle concepts for powered-two wheelers is very high and will even rise with hybridization, the simulation of emissions and fuel consumption is indispensable for further development towards more environmentally friendly mobility. In this work, an adaptive artificial neural network based predictive model for emission and fuel consumption simulation of motorcycles operated in real world conditions is presented. The model is developed in Matlab and Simulink and is integrated into a longitudinal vehicle dynamic simulation whereby it is possible to simulate various and not yet measured test cycles. Subsequently, it is possible to predict real drive emissions RDE and on-road fuel consumption by a minimum of previous measurement effort.

Small engines for non-automotive applications include 2-stroke and 4-stroke gasoline engine concepts which have a reduced number of sensors due to cost and packaging constraints. In order to cope with future emission regulations, more sophisticated engine control and monitoring becomes mandatory. Therefore, a cost-effective way has to be found to gain maximum information from the existing sensors and actuators. Due to an increasing bio-fuel share in the market, the detection of bio-fuel content is necessary to guarantee a stable combustion by adapting the injection and ignition control strategy. Meaningful information about the combustion can be retrieved from combustion chamber ion current measurements. This paper proposes a general overview of combustion process monitoring in different engine concepts by measuring the ion current during combustion.

There are several reasons for equipping an internal combustion engine with a turbo-charger. The most important motivation for motorcycle use is to increase the power to weight ratio. Focusing on the special boundary conditions of motorcycles, like the wide engine speed range or the extraordinarily high demands on response behavior, automotive downsizing technologies cannot be transferred directly to this field of application. This led to the main question: Is it possible to design a turbo-charged motorcycle engine with satisfactory drivability and response behavior? The layout of the charged motorcycle engine was derived by simulation and had to be verified by experimental investigations. Main components, like the turbo charger or the waste gate control as well as the influence of the increasing back pressure on the combustion, were verified by test bench measurements. Afterwards the operation strategy in general was investigated and applied to the prototype engine.

This paper introduces a research project on a spark ignition engine used in non-road applications. The aim is to illustrate the present situation as basis for comparison and to identify possible improvement potential in terms of performance, efficiency or exhaust and noise emissions. The study is carried out in two steps. First a standard walk-behind lawn mower is equipped with measuring instrumentation for recording the cutting forces and the engine variables during real world operation. The tests are carried out on three different lawn types and two different blade types are investigated. Consequently, in a second step the engine is analysed on the engine test bench in stationary and transient operating mode. A complete engine mapping is done regarding all relevant variables. Additionally to the outdoor tests, fuel consumption and engine out emissions are measured on the engine dynamometer. The recorded data enables a detailed analysis of the engine behaviour.