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A novel combined power and cooling cycle based on the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and the Compression Refrigeration Cycle (CRC) is proposed. The cycle can be driven by the exhaust heat from a diesel engine. In this combined cycle, ORC will translate the exhaust heat into power, and drive the compressor of CRC. The prime advantage of the combined cycle is that both the ORC and CRC are trans-critical cycles, and using CO₂ as working fluid. Natural, cheap, environmentally friendly, nontoxic and good heat transfer properties are some advantages of CO₂ as working fluid. In this paper, besides the basic combined cycle (ORC-CRC), another three novel cycles: ORC-CRC with an expander (ORC-CRCE), ORC with an internal heat exchanger as heat accumulator combined with CRC (ORCI-CRC), ORCI-CRCE, are analyzed and compared.

Wall temperature in GDI engine is influenced by both water jacket and gas heat source. In turn, wall temperature affects evaporation and mixing characteristics of impingement spray as well as combustion process and emissions. Therefore, in order to accurately simulate combustion process, accurate wall temperature is essential, which can be obtained by conjugate heat transfer (CHT) and piston heat transfer (PHT) models based on mapping combustion results. This CHT model considers temporal interaction between solid parts and cooling water. This paper presents an integrated methodology to reliably predict in-cylinder combustion process and temperature field of a 2.0L GDI engine which includes engine head/block/gasket and water jacket components. A two-way coupling numerical procedure on the basis of this integrated methodology is as follows.

Motor thermal management of electric vehicles (EVs) is becoming more significant due to its close relations to vehicle aerodynamic performance and power consumption, while computer aided engineering (CAE) plays an important role in its development. A 1D-3D coupled model is established to characterize transient thermal performance of the motor in an electric vehicle on a high performance computer (HPC) platform. The 1D motor thermal management model is integrated with the 1D powertrain model, and a 3D thermal model is established for the motor, while online data exchange is realized between the 1D and 3D models. The 1D model gives boundaries such as inlet coolant temperature, mass flowrate and motor heat generation to the 3D model, while the 3D model gives back boundaries such as heat transfer to coolant simultaneously. Transient simulations are performed for the 140kph(20°C) driving cycle, and the model is calibrated with experimental data.

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is widely recognized as an outstanding portable power plant and expected to be possibly commercialization in the near future. As is well known, mechanical stresses implemented on the bipolar plates during the assembly procedure should have prominent influences on mass and heat transfer behavior inside the cell, as well as the resultant performance. In this study, an analytical model is proposed to comprehensively investigate the influence of clamping force on the mass transport, electrochemical properties and overall cell output capability of a PEM fuel cell. The results indicate that proper clamping force not only benefits the gas leakage prevention but also increases the contact area between the neighboring components to decrease the contact ohmic resistance.

Nowadays the strong knocking combustion involving destructive pressure wave or shock wave has become the main bottleneck for highly boosted engines when pursuing high thermal efficiency. However, its fundamental mechanism is still not fully understood. In this study, synchronization measurements through simultaneous pressure acquisition and high-speed direct photography were performed to comparatively investigate the strong knocking combustion of iso-octane and propane in a rapid compression machine with flat piston design. The pressure characteristics and visualized images of autoignition and reaction wave propagation were compared, and the correlations between thermodynamic trajectories and mixture reactivity progress were analyzed. The results show that iso-octane behaves a greater propensity to strong knocking combustion than propane at similar target pressures.

The potential of diesel/gasoline RCCI combustion coupled with late intake valve closing (LIVC) and double direct injection of diesel for meeting high fuel efficiency with ultra-low emissions was investigated in this study. The study was aiming at high load operation in a heavy-duty diesel engine. Based on the reactivity stratification of RCCI combustion, the employment of double injection of diesel fuel provided concentration stratification of the high-reactivity fuel, which is to further realize effective control of the combustion process. Meanwhile, late intake valve closing (LIVC) strategy is introduced to control the maximum in-cylinder pressure and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions.

PEMFC (proton exchange membrane or polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell) is a potential candidate as a future power source for automobile applications. Water and thermal management is important to PEMFC operation. Numerical models, which describe the transport and electrochemical phenomena occurring in PEMFCs, are important to the water and thermal management of fuel cells. 3D (three-dimensional) multi-scale CFD (computational fluid dynamics) models take into account the real geometry structure and thus are capable of predicting real operation/performance. In this study, a 3D multi-phase CFD model is employed to simulate a large-scale PEMFC (109.93 cm2) under various operating conditions. More specifically, the effects of operating pressure (1.0-4.0 atm) on fuel cell performance and internal water and thermal characteristics are studied in detail under two inlet humidities, 100% and 40%.

Pumping Mean Effective Pressure (PMEP) is the main factor limiting the improvement of thermal efficiency in a spark-ignition (SI) engine under low load. One of the ways to reduce the pumping loss under low load is to use Cylinder DeActivation (CDA). The CDA aims at reducing the firing density (FD) of the SI engine under low load operation and increasing the mass of air-fuel mixture within one cycle in one cylinder to reduce the throttling effect and further reducing the PMEP. The multi-stroke cycles can also reduce the firing density of the SI engine after some certain reasonable design, which is feasible to improve the thermal efficiency of the engine under low load in theory. The research was carried out on a calibrated four-cylinder SI engine simulation platform. The thermal efficiency improvements of the 6-stroke cycle and 8-stroke cycle to the engine performance were studied compared with the traditional 4-stroke cycle under low load conditions.

Hybrid powertrain has been proven to be an effective fuel-saving technology in commercial vehicles, but many hybrid commercial vehicles still use conventional diesel engines, resulting in limited fuel savings. The main purpose of this study is to enhance the thermal efficiency of a dedicated hybrid diesel engine focusing on the characteristic operating conditions. Via fundamental thermodynamics process analysis of internal combustion engine, steel piston with high compression ratio, air system involving two-stage turbocharger(2TC) with an intercooler, and late intake valve closing(IVC) timing are proposed to improve the thermal efficiency of the engine. Experimental results show that high compression ratio and lower thermal conductivity of the combustion chamber surface lead to lower heat release rates, requiring optimization of piston profile to accelerate the mixing rate. Besides, high compression ratio also leads to higher mechanical losses.