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Continuous efforts to develop a lightweight alloy suitable for the most demanding applications in automotive industry resulted in a number of advanced aluminum (Al) and magnesium alloys and manufacturing routes. One example of this is the application of 319 Al alloy for production of 3.6L V6 gasoline engine blocks. Aluminum is sand cast around Fe-liner cylinder inserts, prior to undergoing the T7 heat treatment process. One of the critical factors determining the quality of the final product is the type, level, and profile of residual stresses along the Fe liners (or extent of liner distortion) that are always present in a cast component. In this study, neutron diffraction was used to characterize residual stresses along the Al and the Fe liners in the web region of the cast engine block. The strains were measured both in Al and Fe in hoop, radial, and axial orientations. The stresses were subsequently determined using generalized Hooke's law.

The development of an optimized heat treatment schedule, with the aim of maximizing strength and relieving tensile residual stress, is important to prevent in-service cylinder distortion in Al alloy engine blocks containing cast-in gray iron liners. However, to effectively optimize the engine block heat treatment schedule, the current solutionizing parameters must be analyzed and compared to the as-cast condition to establish a baseline for residual stress relief. In this study, neutron diffraction was carried out to measure the residual stress along the aluminum cylinder bridge following solution heat treatment. The stresses were measured in the hoop, radial and axial orientations and compared to a previous measured as-cast (TSR) engine block. The results suggest that solution heat treatment using the current production parameters partially relieved tensile residual stress in the Al cylinder bridge, with stress relief being more effective near the bottom of the cylinder.

This paper presents a review of the flight deck and cabin fire and smoke incidents reported to the Canadian airworthiness authorities over a ten year span. The fire and smoke related diversions are categorized to identify areas where efforts could be increased to improve safety. The costs of diversions are estimated to identify areas where operators could reduce costs by seeking technologies to reduce the number of diversions without any impact on safety. Only twenty-eight investigation reports into fire and smoke incidents onboard aircraft have been published over the past three decades. These reports are not sufficient to identify areas where operators can reduce their operating costs. The Canadian airworthiness authorities received over 1,000 smoke and fire incidents from the years 2001 to 2010, of which, over 680 reported fire and smoke in the flight deck and cabin compartments for various makes and models of aircraft.

Natural gas (NG)-diesel dual-fuel combustion can be a suitable solution to reduce the overall CO2 emissions of heavy-duty vehicles using diesel engines. One configuration of such a dual-fuel engine can be port injection of NG to form a combustible air-NG mixture in the cylinder. This mixture is then ignited by a direct injection of diesel. Other potential advantages of such an engine include the flexibility of switching back to diesel-only mode, reduced hardware development costs and lower soot emissions. However, the trade-off is lower brake thermal efficiency (BTE) and higher hydrocarbon emissions, especially methane, at low load and/or high engine speed conditions. Advancing the diesel injection timing tends to improve the BTE but may cause the NOx emissions to increase.

Development of lightweight alloys suitable for automobile applications has been of great importance to the automotive industry in recent years. The use of 319 type aluminum alloy in the production of gasoline engine blocks is an example of this shift towards light alloys for large automobile components. However, excessive residual stress along the cylinder bores of these engine blocks may cause problems during engine operation. Therefore, in this study, neutron diffraction was used to evaluate residual stresses along the aluminum cylinder bridge and the gray cast iron liners. The strains were measured in the hoop, radial, and axial orientations, while stresses were subsequently calculated using generalized Hooke's law. The results suggest that the residual stress magnitude for the aluminum cylinder bridge was tensile for all three measured components and gradually increased with cylinder depth towards the bottom of the cylinder.

In recent years, light weight components have been an area of significant importance in automotive design. This has led to the replacement of steel and cast iron with aluminum alloys for many automotive components. For instance, Al-Si alloys have successfully replaced nodular and gray cast iron in the production of large automotive components such as engine blocks. However, excessive residual strain along the cylinder bores of these engine blocks may result in cylinder distortion during engine operation. Therefore, in this study, neutron diffraction was used to evaluate residual strain along the aluminum cylinder bridge and the gray cast iron liners of distorted and undistorted engine blocks. The strains were measured in the hoop, radial, and axial orientations. The results suggest that the residual strain along the aluminum cylinder bridge of the distorted engine block was tensile for all three measured components.

This paper describes a numerical model that simulates the thermal interaction between ice particles, water droplets, and the flowing air applicable during icing wind tunnel tests where there is significant phase-change of the cloud. It has been previously observed that test conditions, most notably temperature and humidity, change when the icing cloud is activated. It is hypothesized that the ice particles and water droplets thermally interact with the flowing air causing the air temperature and humidity to change by the time it reaches the test section. Unlike previous models where the air and particles are uncoupled, this model attempts to explain the observed changes in test conditions by coupling the conservation of mass and energy equations. The model is compared to measurements taken during wind tunnel tests simulating ice-crystal and mixed-phase icing that relate to ice accretions within turbofan engines.

This study reports gaseous and particle (ultrafine and black carbon (BC)) emissions from a turbofan engine core on standard Jet A-1 and three alternative fuels, including 100% hydrothermolysis synthetic kerosene with aromatics (CH-SKA), 50% Hydro-processed Esters and Fatty Acid paraffinic kerosene (HEFA-SPK), and 100% Fischer Tropsch (FT-SPK). Gaseous emissions from this engine for various fuels were similar but significant differences in particle emissions were observed. During the idle condition, it was observed that the non-refractory mass fraction in the emitted particles were higher than during higher engine load condition. This observation is consistent for all test fuels. The 100% CH-SKA fuel was found to have noticeable reductions in BC emissions when compared to Jet A-1 by 28-38% by different BC instruments (and 7% in refractory particle number (PN) emissions) at take-off condition.

The effects of cetane number and the cetane enhancing additives on diesel exhaust emissions were investigated on a single cylinder DI research engine. The engine used in this study incorporates the features of contemporary medium-to-heavy duty diesel engines and is tuned to US EPA 1994 emission standards. The engine experiments were run using the AVL 8-mode steady-state simulation of the U.S. EPA heavy-duty transient test procedure. The experimental fuels included diesel fuels obtained from different sources with various natural cetane ratings as well as a number of fuels blended by adding two cetane improvers into three base fuels. The two cetane improvers we used were a nitrate-type additive and a peroxide-type additive. Increasing the cetane number resulted in a general decrease in NOx emissions. Similar reductions in NOx emissions were observed with increasing cetane number for all the base fuels irrespective of the cetane improver used in the fuel.

This paper presents the emission characteristics of a HCCI engine operation using n-heptane. The experiments were conducted in a single cylinder Co-operative Fuel Research (CFR) engine equipped with an air-assist port fuel injector. The effects of intake temperature, air/fuel ratio, compression ratio, turbo-charging, and EGR rate on exhaust emissions were explored. The analysis of the exhaust gases included oxides of nitrogen (NOx), nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon monoxide (CO), total hydrocarbon (THC), and soot. The hydrocarbon species present in exhaust gases and their concentrations at several operating conditions were also characterized. The strategies to obtain low HC, CO and NOx emissions are presented and discussed. The approaches to effectively retard HCCI combustion phase without deteriorating combustion efficiency are examined. It was found that HCCI combustion produces extremely low soot and NOx emissions.

This paper presents a review of our current experimental and theoretical understanding of icing feathers and the role that they play in the formation of ice accretions. It covers the following areas: a short review of past research work related to icing feathers; a discussion of the physical characteristics and terminology used in describing icing feathers; the presence of feathers on ice accretions formed in unswept airfoils, especially at SLD conditions; the role that icing feathers play in the formation of ice accretion shapes on swept wings; the formation of icing feathers from roughness elements; theoretical considerations regarding feather formation, feather interaction to form complex icing structures, the role of film dynamics in the formation of roughness elements and the formation of feathers. Hypotheses related to feather formation and feather growth are discussed.

Surface water film dynamics is recognized as playing an important role in the glaze ice accretion process. The solution, in general scaling problems, requires the match of all the relevant non-dimensional parameters to take place individually. However, in water film dynamics similarity, we encounter that is not possible for both Reynolds and Weber numbers to be matched simultaneously, and the strict individual parameter similarity condition has to be relaxed and combination of parameters accepted as a reasonable compromise. In this paper, a film Weber number will be defined and then proposed as a similarity parameter along with the non-dimensional film thickness as well as others that have been long recognized as well established, to form the set of equations that determine the scaled variables in terms of the reference ones.

An experiment was conducted in the Icing Research Tunnel (IRT) at NASA Glenn Research Center to study the effect of sweep angle and temperature on the formation of ice accretions on a NACA 0012 swept wing at SLD conditions. From a baseline Appendix-C condition with a MVD of 20m the drop size was changed to 110 and 200m for the SLD cases. Casting data, ice shape tracings, time-sequence and photographic data were obtained. Time-sequence photography was taken during each run to capture in real time the formation of the ice accretion. Measurements of the critical distance were obtained.

The effects of fuel properties of both oil-sands-derived and conventional-crude-oil-derived diesel fuels were investigated on a single-cylinder DI research engine. The engine used in this study incorporated features of contemporary medium- to heavy-duty diesel engines and was tuned to the U.S. EPA 1994 emission standards. The engine experiments were run using the AVL 8-mode steady-state simulation of the U.S. EPA heavy-duty transient test procedure. The experimental fuels included 12 fuels blended using refinery streams to have controlled total aromatic levels and 7 other diesel fuels obtained from different sources. The results showed that at a constant cetane number (44) and sulfur content (150 ppm), oil-sands-derived fuels produced similar NOx emissions as their conventional-crude-oil-derived counterparts and total aromatic content and fuel density could be used in a regression model to predict NOx emissions.

Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion characteristics of dual-stage autoignition fuels were examined over the speed range of 600 to 1700 rpm using a Cooperative Fuels Research (CFR) engine. A fuel vaporizer was used to preheat and partially vaporize the fuel inside the intake plenum. The air and fuel were well-mixed prior to entering the cylinder. Since low temperature heat release (LTHR) is known to be an important factor that affects HCCI combustion of fuels that exhibit dual-stage autoignition behavior, a detailed heat release analyses were performed on both time and crank angle bases. At the lower and upper speeds, the operating ranges were compared as a function of air/fuel ratio (AFR) and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) from the knocking to misfiring limits. The AFR-EGR operating region was more limited at 1700 rpm than at 900 rpm for the commercial ULSD fuel. Combustion stability was problematic at higher engine speeds.

The effects of cetane number, aromatics content and 90% distillation temperature (T90) on HCCI combustion were investigated using a fuel matrix designed by the Fuels for Advanced Combustion Engines (FACE) Working Group of the Coordinating Research Council (CRC). The experiments were conducted in a single-cylinder, variable compression ratio, Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine. The fuels were atomized and partially vaporized in the intake manifold. The engine was operated at a relative air/fuel ratio of 1.2, 60% exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and 900 rpm. The compression ratio was varied over the range of 9:1 to 15:1 to optimize the combustion phasing for each fuel, keeping other operating parameters constant. The results show that cetane number and T90 distillation temperature significantly affected the combustion phasing. Cetane number was clearly found to have the strongest effect.

An understanding of icing physics is required for the development of both scaling methods and ice-accretion prediction codes. This paper gives an overview of our present understanding of the important physical processes and the associated similarity parameters that determine the shape of Appendix C ice accretions. For many years it has been recognized that ice accretion processes depend on flow effects over the model, on droplet trajectories, on the rate of water collection and time of exposure, and, for glaze ice, on a heat balance. For scaling applications, equations describing these events have been based on analyses at the stagnation line of the model and have resulted in the identification of several non-dimensional similarity parameters. The parameters include the modified inertia parameter of the water drop, the accumulation parameter and the freezing fraction. Other parameters dealing with the leading-edge heat balance have also been used for convenience.

The exhaust emissions from a single-cylinder version of a heavy-duty diesel engine with exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) were studied using 12 diesel fuels derived from oil sands and conventional sources. The test fuels were blended from 22 refinery streams to produce four fuels (two from each source) at three different total aromatic levels (10, 20, and 30% by mass). The cetane numbers were held constant at 43. Exhaust emissions were measured using the AVL eight-mode steady-state test procedure. PM emissions were accurately modeled by a single regression equation with two predictors, total aromatics and sulphur content. Sulphate emissions were found to be independent of the type of sulphur compound in the fuel. NOx emissions were accurately modeled by a single regression equation with total aromatics and density as predictor variables. PM and NOx emissions were significantly significantly affected by fuel properties, but crude oil source did not play a role.

A comparison of scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS) and laser-induced incandescence (LII) measurements of diesel particulate matter (PM) was performed. The results reveal the significance of the aggregate nature of diesel PM on interpretation of size and volume fraction measurements obtained with an SMPS, and the accuracy of primary particle size measurements by LII. Volume fraction calculations based on the mobility diameter measured by the SMPS substantially over-predict the space-filling volume fraction of the PM. Correction algorithms for the SMPS measurements, to account for the fractal nature of the aggregate morphology, result in a substantial reduction in the reported volume. The behavior of the particulate volume fraction, mean and standard deviation of the mobility diameter, and primary particle size are studied as a function of the EGR for a range of steady-state engine speeds and loads for a turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been widely applied in internal combustion (IC) engine research. The integration of chemical kinetic model with CFD provides an opportunity for researchers to investigate the detailed chemical reactions for better understanding the combustion process of IC engines. However, the simulation using CFD has generally focused on the examination of primary parameters, such as temperature and species distributions. The detailed investigation on chemical reactions is limited. This paper presents the development of a post-processing tool capable of calculating the rate of production (ROP) of interested species with the known temperature, pressure, and concentration of each species in each cell simulated using CONVERGE-SAGE CFD model.