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A simultaneous multi-composition analyzing (SMCA) resonance enhanced multi-photon ionization (REMPI) system was used to investigate gasoline engine exhaust. Observed peaks for exhaust were smaller mass numbers than those from diesel exhaust. However, large species up to three ring aromatics were observed suggesting that soot precursor forms even in the gasoline engine. At low catalyst temperature condition, the reduction efficiencies of a three-way catalyst were higher for higher mass numbers. This result indicates that the larger species accumulate in the catalyst or elsewhere due to their lower vapor pressures. To evaluate the emission of low volatility species, the accumulation should be taken into account. In the hot mode, reduction efficiencies for aromatic species of three-way catalyst were almost 99.5% however, they fall to 70% in the cold start condition.

In an automotive suspension, a shock absorber plays a significant role to enhance the vehicle performances, particularly ride comfort and road holding. Because of its important influences on the overall vehicle performances, the understanding of its physical characteristics is essential. Thus, this paper develops a mathematical model of twin-tube shock absorber that is widely used in modern production cars. The model is derived based on a rational polynomial formulation. This formulation generally represents the flow behaviors of fluid across a restriction. Further, simulation results are compared to those obtained from experiments to determine the model accuracy. The result comparison illustrates that the model is able to describe the behavior of shock absorber with slight discrepancies.

In a state-of-the-art lean-burn spark ignition engine, a strong in-cylinder flow field with enhanced turbulence intensity is formed, and understanding the wall heat transfer mechanism of such a complex flow is required. The flow velocity and temperature profiles inside the wall boundary layer are strongly related to the heat transfer mechanism. In this study, two-dimensional three-component (2D3C) velocity distribution near the piston top surface was measured during the compression stroke in a strong tumble flow using a rapid compression and expansion machine (RCEM) and a stereoscopic micro-PIV system. The bore, stroke, compression ratio, and compression time were 75 mm, 128 mm, 15, and 30 ms (equivalent to 1000 rpm), respectively.

In order to investigate the mechanism of heat transfer on the chamber wall of direct-injection diesel engines, 2-D temperature imaging and heat flux measurement in the flame impinging region on the chamber wall were conducted using laser-induced phosphorescence technique. The temperature of the chamber wall surface was measured by the calibrated intensity variation of the 355nm-excited laser-induced phosphorescence from an electrophoretically deposited thin layer of La2O2S:Eu phosphor on a quartz glass plate placed in a rapid compression and expansion machine (RCEM). Instantaneous 2-D images of wall temperature at different timings after start of injection and time-resolved (10kHz) heat flux near the flame impinging region were obtained for combusting and non-combusting diesel sprays with impinging distance of 23.4mm at different injection pressures (80 and 120MPa).

‘Three kinds of new simultaneous optimum design methods of plural dynamic absorbers are proposed. These methods allow the optimum tuning in many natural modes of multiple degrees of freedom structures or a continuous bodies simultaneously to effectively suppress vibration. Changes of natural modes and natural frequencies of the main structure due to added mass effect of dynamic absorbers can be taken into account in the design. Validity and usefulness of the proposed methods are verified by both a computer simulation and by experiments.

To investigate the ignition process in a diesel spray, the ignition in a transient fuel spray is analyzed numerically by a simple quasi-steady spray model coupled with the Shell kinetics model at various operating conditions and validity of this model is assessed by a comparison with existing experimental data. The calculated results indicate that the competition between the heat absorption of fuel and the hot air entrainment determines the equivalence ratio of mixtures favorable for the ignition to occur in the shortest time.

Trapping of diesel particulates and phenomena of chemical reaction in regeneration were investigated by visualization through the cross-sectional area of a diesel-particulate-filter wall, using a digital-microscope with a high focusing depth. Herein, SiC-DPF walls were polished up to make a uniform height and to create a mirror-like surface on each SiC-particle-grain. At the beginning of the trapping process, it was observed that large particulates were trapped once in the small pores inside the wall, and then, since the flow-pattern was changed drastically, the trapped particulates were pushed out and blown off again, and finally, trapped in a region further downstream. As time passed, image analysis disclosed that since fine particulates were deposited around the SiC-particle-grain surface, the flow-channels became increasingly narrow.

Hydraulically damped rubber engine mounts (HDM) are an effective means of providing sufficient isolation from engine vibration while also providing significant damping to control the rigid body motions of the engine during normal driving conditions. This results in a system which exhibits a high degree of non-linearity in terms of both frequency and amplitude. The numerical simulation of vibration isolation characteristics of HDM is difficult due to the fluid-structure interaction between the main supporting rubber and fluid in chambers, the nonlinear material properties, the large deformation of rubber parts, structure contact problems among the inner parts, and the turbulent flow in the inertia track. In this paper an integrated numerical simulation analysis based on structural FEM and a lumped-parameter model of HDM is carried out.

This paper presents the polytopic modeling method and state variable observer design approach for semi-active suspension with changeable damping and variant stiffness elements. And such semi-active suspension system is suitable to be modeled as a dynamic polytopic system where the extreme vertices of damping and stiffness values are taken as the convex vertices of polytope. Thus, a dynamic polytopic model is the convex synthesis with all the vertex system dynamics and linear system theory can be applied to the system at each vertex. Herein, the conventional Kalman filter theory is utilized to design the observer for each vertex system, then the polytopic observer is formulated by a convex synthesis. The proposed observer design approach is testified by numerical study and vehicle test.

As an important class of nonlinear system, polytopic bilinear system is investigated. Combined with the properties of convex polytope, the nonlinear control for polytopic bilinear system is formulated by synthesizing nonlinear H∞ controller which is designed for polytopic bilinear system at vertices. For a semi-active suspension system with controllable damping and variant stiffness elements, it is easily modeled as a polytopic bilinear system model. In this case, the desired nonlinear control properties are pursued in making effective use of the changeable damping property while the variant stiffness is taken as the affine parameter of polytopic model. Therefore, polytopic bilinear system model could be reduced to a feasible problem by polytopic convex decomposition. Then the control problem of bilinear system model is to find a solution of nonlinear H∞ control.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the turbulent mixing in a diesel spray by large eddy simulation (LES). As the first step for the numerical simulation of diesel spray by LES, the LES of transient circular gas jets and particle laden jets were conducted. The simulation of transient circular jets in cylindrical coordinates has numerical instability near the central axis. To reduce the instability of calculation, azimuthal velocity around the central axis is calculated by the linear interpolation and filter width around the axis is modified to the radial or axial grid scale level. A transient circular gas jet was calculated by the modified code and the computational results were compared with experimental results with a Reynolds number of about 13000. The computational results of mean velocity and turbulent intensity agreed with experimental results for z/D>10. Predicted tip penetration of the jet also agreed to experimental data.

In this study, the genetic algorithm so called GA is newly applied for the optimization of many engine mounting parameters, calculations of stiffness matrix and inverse matrix to obtain 6 degrees of freedoms displacements at mounting points and a center of gravity. As a result, the optimized result could be shortly obtained in a minute, and an inexperienced engineer could easily make the optimum engine mounting layout, which can satisfy the vibration isolation and the non-interference in an engine compartment.

Measurements of Excitation-Emission Matrix (EEM) of shock-heated vapors of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at high temperature (750-1500K) and high pressure (0.3-1.3MPa) conditions were conducted using a multi-wavelength excitation laser in order to demonstrate the potential of the single-measurement EEM fluorometry for investigation of soot precursors. Argon-diluted vapors of naphthalene and pyrene, as PAH model compounds, were heated in an optically accessible shock tube. The PAH vapors were excited by a coherent multi-wavelength “rainbow” laser light generated by converting the 4th harmonic (266nm) of a pulsed Nd:YAG laser using a Raman cell frequency converter filled with high-pressure (2MPa) methane-hydrogen mixture.

The two-dimensional distribution of a soot cloud in an unsteady spray flame in a rapid compression machine(RCM) was visualized using the laser sheet scattering technique. A 40 mm x 50 mm cross section on the flame axis was illuminated by a thin laser sheet from a single pulsed Nd:YAG laser(wavelength 532 nm). Scattered light from soot particles was taken by a CCD camera via a high speed gated image intensifier. The temporal variation of the scattered light images were presented with the injection pressure as a parameter. The results showed that scattered light was intense near the periphery of the flame tip and that the scattered light becomes weaker significantly and disappears fast after the end of injection as injection pressure is increased. This technique was also applied to the visualization of the two-dimensional distribution of liquid droplets in the non-evaporating spray to correlate it with the soot concentration distribution.

The structure of dense sprays was investigated using 2-D imaging techniques. To investigate the mechanism of atomization, the liquid phase in a non-evaporating spray was visualized by a thin laser sheet formed by a single pulse from a Nd:YAG laser at the distance from 4 to 19 mm from the nozzle orifice with the injection pressure and the surrounding gas density as parameters. A new technique for the visualization of vapor phase in an evaporating spray, the SSI (Silicone particle Scattering Imaging) method, was proposed to investigate the structure of the vapor phase regions of the spray.

The formation and oxidation processes of soot particles in unsteady spray flames were investigated in a quiescent atmosphere using 2-D laser sheet visualization. The mid-plane of a flame was illuminated twice during a short time-interval by a laser sheet from a double-pulsed YAG laser. An image pair of the scattered light from soot particles was taken by two intensified gated cameras in succession. The velocity vectors of soot clouds at various location in the sooting region were estimated using the spatial correlation between the image pair. The results of temporal and spatial variation of velocity and scattering intensity in the evolving soot clusters made it clear that soot is mainly formed in the periphery of the flame tip where the air entrainment is less and flame temperature favors soot formation.

To understand further the mixing process between the injected fuel and air in the combustion chamber of a diesel engine, the turbulent mixing process in a one-phase, two-dimensional transient jet was theoretically studied using the discrete vortex simulation. First, the simulation model was evaluated by comparisons between calculated and experimental data on two-dimensional turbulent jets. Second, the trajectories of the injected fluid elements marked with different colors were graphically demonstrated. Also the process of entrainment of the surrounding fluid into the jet was visually presented using colored tracers.

To measure the fuel vapor concentration in an unsteady evaporating spray injected into nitrogen atmosphere, the exciplex-forming method, which produces spectrally separated fluorescence from the liquid and vapor phase, was applied in this study. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the qualitative and quantitative applicability of the technique in a high temperature and high pressure atmosphere during the fuel injection period. One is to examine the thermal decomposition of TMPD dopant at a high temperature and a high pressure nitrogen atmosphere during a short period of time. The other is to calibrate the relationship between fluorescence intensity and vapor concentration of TMPD at different vapor temperatures. And then, the qualitative measurement of fuel vapor concentration distributions in diesel sprays was made by applying the technique.

The cross-sectional distribution of fuel vapor concentration in an evaporating spray was measured quantitatively by a new scattering imaging technique, silicone particle scattering imaging method, which was proposed in a previous paper[1]. When fuel containing silicone oil injected into a nitrogen environment at high temperature, the volatile base fuel in the droplets vaporized rapidly, leaving behind small droplets of silicone oil suspended in the vapor-gas mixture. The silicone oil droplets were illuminated by a thin laser sheet, and the scattered light was imaged by a CCD camera. The cross-sectional distribution of vapor concentration was estimated from the scattering image of the silicone oil droplets by Mie scattering theory. The results demonstrated clearly the inhomogeneity of the fuel vapor concentration. The distribution of vapor concentration was discontinuous, and islands of rich mixture with a scale of several millimeters existed in the center region of the spray.

Two methods have been developed for real time identification and classification of the roughness pattern of road surfaces using the neural network. These methods are directly available both for semi-active and active vibration controls of cars. Accelerations of the rear wheel axis under the suspension are used as the input data for real time identification. The neural network which has acquired the informations of the seven typical roughness patterns is used for real time classification of actual road surfaces during driving. Validity and usefulness of these methods are verified by simulation.