Search Results

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.

Due to the advantages of low weight, low emissions and good fuel economy, downsized turbocharged gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines are widely-applied nowadays. However, Low-Speed Pre-Ignition (LSPI) phenomenon observed in these engines restricts their improvement of performance. Some researchers have shown that auto-ignition of lubricant in the combustion chamber has a great effect on the LSPI frequency. To study the auto-ignition characteristics of lubricant, an innovative single droplet auto-ignition test system for lubricant and its mixture is designed and developed, with better accuracy and effectiveness. The experiments are carried out by hanging lubricant droplets on the thermocouple node under active thermo-atmosphere provided by a small “Dibble burner”. The auto-ignition process of lubricant droplets is recorded by a high-speed camera.

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.

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.

Urea-SCR system is one of the after-treatment methods for diesel engines, which could effectively reduce the NOX emissions and enable diesel engines to meet increasingly stringent emission legislations. Within the urea-SCR system, characteristics of urea-solution spray, especially the distribution uniformity of spray droplets as well as gaseous NH₃ within the exhaust pipe, play an important role in the efficiency of catalytic reduction. In this paper, an SCR spray visualization test bench was set up. Urea-solution from a non-air-assist injector is injected into the steady stream of simulated exhaust gas flow. The transient characteristics of spray are recorded by high-speed photography. Specific spray characteristics in the original photographs, i.e., mixing distance and degree of uniformity are extracted. The influence of injection pressure and injection angle on spray characteristics are tested in different sets of experiments.

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%.

According to the requirements of two-wheel vehicle's future market and the characteristic of urban road conditions in China, the advantages and disadvantages of three basic configurations for the Hybrid Electric Vehicle are compared, finally, the serial hybrid configuration is chosen to be applied to hybrid Electric Moped solution. The selection principle of main components of this hybrid powertrain system includes ICE, generator, battery and hub motor, and the optimal match for performance parameters of these components are introduced in this paper. Then, a hybrid system model is established based on AVL-CRUISE. The simulations of fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions for both serial hybrid moped and conventional motorcycle is offered.

The exhaust aftertreatment strategy is one of the most fundamental aspects of spark ignition engine technologies. For various types of engines (e.g., carburetor engine, PFI engine and GDI engine), measuring, purifying, modeling, and control strategies regarding the exhaust aftertreatment systems vary significantly. The primary goal of exhaust aftetreatment systems is to reduce the exhaust emission levels of NOx, HC and CO as well as to lower combustion soot. In general, there is a tradeoff among different engine performance aspects. The exhaust catalytic systems, such as the three way catalyst (TWC) and lean NOx trap (LNT) converters, can be applied together with the development of other engine technologies (e.g., variable valve timing, cold start). With respect to engine soot, some advanced diagnosing techniques are essential to obtain thorough investigation of exhaust emission mechanisms.

Engine-off strategy are popular used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) for fuel saving. The engine of an HEV will start and stop frequently according to the road condition. In order to obtain excellent fuel economy and emissions performance, the fuel injection during engine quick start should be optimized. In this paper, the characteristic of mixture formation and the HC emissions at the first 5 cycles which contribute the most HCs were investigated. After the analysis of mixture preparation during start process, the HC emissions during engine quick start were optimized by means of cycle-by-cycle fuel injection control strategy. The fuel mixture concentration during start-up process fluctuates more dramatically under hot start condition. Typically, the mixture at 4th and 5th cycle is over-riched. Based on the original engine calibration, the fuel injection at the initial 5 cycles was optimized respectively.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) provide significantly improvement in fuel economy over conventional vehicles as well as reductions in greenhouse gas and petroleum. Numerous recent reports regarding control strategy, power train configuration, driving pattern, all electric range (AER) and their effects on fuel consumption and electric energy consumption of PHEVs are reported. Meanwhile, the control strategy for engine start-stop and mileage between recharging events from the electricity grid also has an important influence on the petroleum displacement potential of PHEVs, but few reports are published. In this paper, a detailed simulation model is set up for a plug-in series hybrid electric vehicle (PSHEV) employing the AVL CRUISE. The model was employed to predict the AER of the baseline PSHEV using rule-based logical threshold switching control strategy.

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.

An experimental study is presented on the evaporation of diluted droplet-laden two-phase jet flows within a heated air channel co-flow. In this study, n-heptane is pre-atomized by an ultrasonic nozzle to produce droplet cluster with a median diameter of about15μm, and a continuous cold air flow is applied to carry the fuel droplet cluster to emerge from a nozzle tube, producing a free turbulent jet of droplet stream. The droplet stream is then introduced as a central jet into a square-shaped channel with heated air co-flow for evaporation investigations. With flexibilities of the initial properties of droplet stream and surrounding conditions of channel flow, the axial evolution of droplet size is determined to characterize the evaporation behavior of n-heptane droplet stream under various boundary conditions. The equivalence ratios of droplet streams are varied by changing both the carrier-air flow rate and the fuel flow rate.

In this paper comparisons were made between the fuel economy improvement between a High Pressure loop (HP) water-cooled Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system and a Low Pressure loop (LP) water-cooled EGR system. Experiments were implemented on a 1.3-Litre turbocharged PFI gasoline engine in two pars. One was EGR rate as single operating point to compare the different effect of HP- and LP-EGR. The other was mini map from 1500rpm to 3000rpm and BMEP from 2bar to 14bar because of the relative narrow available range of HP-EGR system. In consideration of practical application of EGR system, the coolant used in this experiment was kept almost the same temperature as in real vehicles (88±3°C) instead of underground water temperature, besides a model was built to calculate constant volume ratio (CVR). The results indicated that the effect of HP-EGR was weaker than that of LP-EGR under the same EGR rate, which could be seen from change of combustion parameters.

Future clean combustion engines tend to increase the cylinder charge to achieve better fuel economy and lower exhaust emissions. The increase of the cylinder charge is often associated with either excessive air admission or exhaust gas recirculation, which leads to unfavorable ignition conditions at the ignition point. Advanced ignition methods and systems have progressed rapidly in recent years in order to suffice the current and future engine development, and a simple increase of energy of the inductive ignition system does not often provide the desired results from a cost-benefit point of view. Proper design of the ignition system circuit is required to achieve certain spark performances.

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.

This research was concerned with the use of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) improving the fuel economy over a wide operating range in a downsized boosted gasoline engine. The experiments were performed in a 1.3-Litre turbocharged PFI gasoline engine, equipped with a Low Pressure (LP) water-cooled EGR system. The operating conditions varied from 1500rpm to 4000rpm and BMEP from 2bar to 17bar. Meanwhile, the engine’s typical operating points in NEDC cycle were tested separately. The compression ratio was also changed from 9.5 to 10.5 to pursue a higher thermal efficiency. A pre-compressor throttle was used in the experiment working together with the EGR loop to keep enough EGR rate over a large area of the engine speed and load map. The results indicated that, combined with a higher compression ratio, the LP-EGR could help to reduce the BSFC by 9∼12% at high-load region and 3∼5% at low-load region.

Research studies have suggested that changes to the ignition system are required to generate a more robust flame kernel in order to secure the ignition process for the future advanced high efficiency spark-ignition (SI) engines. In a typical inductive ignition system, the spark discharge is initiated by a transient high-power electrical breakdown and sustained by a relatively low-power glow process. The electrical breakdown is characterized as a capacitive discharge process with a small quantity of energy coming mainly from the gap parasitic capacitor. Enhancement of the breakdown is a potential avenue effectively for extending the lean limit of SI engine. In this work, the effect of high-power capacitive spark discharge on the early flame kernel growth of premixed methane-air mixtures is investigated through electrical probing and optical diagnosis.

Many studies show that under diesel engine operating conditions, SCR reductant sprays will impinge on the wall of exhaust pipes. In order to understand this impinging process of SCR reductant spray, and to analyze what factors affect it, a test bench was set up by means of high speed video camera. At atmospheric pressure, SCR spray was injected on a heated metal wall, the impacts of wall temperature, injection pressure, injection height and angle on developing characteristics of SCR reductant spray after impinging on the heated wall have been researched and analyzed. The results show that the heated wall temperature has a great impact on the spray developing process, when wall temperature is lower than 405K, after water evaporated the crystallized urea will remain on the wall to block exhaust pipes. When wall temperature is higher, the atomization and evaporation of SCR reductant spray will be better, and the hydrolysis process of urea will be faster.

To improve the cold start performance and to reduce the misfire occurrence at cold start, the start-up strategy of total stoichiometric ratio combined with local rich mixture was applied in the study. The effect of injection strategy (the 1st injection timing, 2nd injection timing, 1st and 2nd fuel injection proportion and ignition timing) on the cold start HC emissions in the initial 10 cycles were investigated in a Two stage direct injection (TSDI) gasoline engine. The transient HC and NO emissions in the initial 10 cycles were analyzed, when the fuels are injected in the only 1st cycle and in the followed all cycles. The transient misfiring HC emissions were compared between the single and two-stage injection modes. In addition, the unburned HC (UBHC) emissions in the 1st cycle are compared among the TSDI engine, Gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine, Port fuel injection (PFI) engine and Liquefied petroleum gaseous (LPG) engine at the stoichiometric ratio.