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Gas distribution of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) is mainly decided by flow field of bipolar plate. The improper design of distributing channel, nonuniform gas flow distribution and current density distribution among different straight channels are the leading factors that could tremendously undermine the performance and life expectancy of the cell. However, there is lack of research focusing on distributing channel in straight-parallel flow field. In this work, a three-dimensional numerical model of PEMFC cathode flow field is developed with CFD method to investigate the effects of configuration type and width of the distributing channel on pressure distribution in distributing channel and on reactant flow distribution, pressure drop and concentration distribution in multiple straight channel. Effects of electrochemical reaction and formation of water on the flow distribution are taken into consideration.

In order to study the fast filling problem of large-capacity on-board hydrogen storage tank for highway passenger cars, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation model of 134L large-capacity hydrogen storage tank was established. By simulating different pre-cooling temperatures and mass flow rates, the temperature distribution and thermal transmission in the tank were observed. Due to the large ratio of length to diameter of the hydrogen tank, the temperature distribution is extremely uneven during the whole filling process, and the high temperature area is mainly concentrated in the tank tail. And the heat transfer between the gas and the tank wall is not obvious under the low and constant mass flow rate. The temperature rise process during the whole filling process under different mass flow conditions was simulated to satisfy the highest safe temperature limit.

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%.

The Linear Internal Combustion Engine-Linear Generator Integrated System (LICELGIS) is different from conventional crank-based engine for reducing frictional losses by eliminating the crankshaft. Thus, the LICELGIS piston stroke is not constrained geometrically and the system compression ratio is variable. During steady-state operation, the LICELGIS converts the fuel chemical energy into electric power with piston assembly reciprocating motion, which can be used as a range-extender in hybrid electric vehicles. The LICELGIS scavenging process is prerequisite and key for the system steady-state operation, which has remarkable influence on mixture gas and, eventually, on engine combustion performance. In order to achieve high scavenging performance, a LICELGIS is investigated in this paper. The LICELGIS motion characteristics and scavenging process were analyzed.

Jet-wake flow and secondary flows are undesirable in torque converters as they are responsible for flow losses and flow nonuniformity; that is, jet-wake flow and secondary flows negatively affect the torque converter performance. Therefore, it is very important to investigate and minimize the undesirable flows to decrease flow losses in torque converter. However, the existing studies are limited to employ geometry design parameter modifications rather than focusing on the actual causes and intrinsic physical mechanism that generate the flows to reduce the flow losses. In this paper, Calculation model of a torque converter is presented first and a three dimensional CFD code was used to simulate the internal flow field of a torque converter. The simulation results coincide with experimental measurements, which verifies the validity of the method. Based on flow field calculation results, the internal flow field of impeller, turbine and stator were analyzed, respectively.

Wheel Aerodynamics is an important part of vehicle aerodynamics. The wheels can notably influence the total aerodynamic drag, lift and ventilation drag of vehicles. In order to simulate the real on-road condition of driving cars, the moving ground and wheel rotation is of major importance in CFD. However, the wheel rotation condition is difficult to be represented exactly, so this is still a critical topic which needs to be worked on. In this paper, a study, which focuses on two types of cars: a fastback sedan and a notchback DrivAer, is conducted. Comparing three different wheel rotating simulation methods: steady Moving wall, MRF and unsteady Sliding Mesh, the effects of different methods for the numerical simulation of vehicle aerodynamics are revealed. Discrepancies of aerodynamic forces between the methods are discussed as well as the flow field, and the simulation results are also compared with published experimental data for validation.

The flow issues of the turbocharged intake system for a diesel engine are mainly introduced in this work and the effects of a multi-chamber perforated resonator which can efficiently attenuate broadband noise and has compact structure on the flow performances of the intake system is analyzed by contrast. Based on the acoustic grid resulting from pre-processing of 3D models for finite element analysis, a computational fluid dynamics flow simulation comparative analysis between the intake systems with and without a resonator including pressure and velocity distribution is conducted with the software Star-CCM+. The simulation results indicate that the air pressure drop of the intake system with a resonator is slightly higher than that of the intake system without a resonator but it is still relatively low compared with that of the entire intake system.

Wind noise becomes the foremost noise source when a car runs at high speeds. High frequency characteristics of wind noise source and effective performance of seal rubbers for insulating leakage noise make research on the Transmission Loss (TL) of automotive door sealing systems significant. The improvement of TL of automotive door sealing system could effectively decrease the interior noise due to wind noise for vehicles at high speeds. In this study, compression simulation of seal rubbers for an automotive door is performed through a Finite Element (FE) tool firstly. Compressed geometries of the seal rubbers are obtained. Then, based on the final compressed geometries and pre-stress modes of the automotive door seal rubbers, the TL of the whole door sealing system is acquired by hybrid Finite Element - Statistic Energy Analysis (FE-SEA) method. The fluctuating surface pressure on a car body was captured by a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool.

The acoustic muffler is one of the practical solutions to reduce the noise in ducts. The acoustic and aerodynamic performances are two critical indices of one muffler for the air intake system of a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV). In this study, the concept of phononic crystal is applied to design the muffler to obtain superior acoustic performance. One duct with periodic and compact resonator-type mufflers is designed for broadband noise attenuation. The two-dimensional (2D) transfer matrix method and bandgap theory are employed to calculate the transmission loss (TL) and acoustic bandgap. It is numerically and theoretically demonstrated that broadband noise attenuation could be acquired from 500Hz to 3500Hz. Afterwards, the three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach is applied to predict the pressure distribution. The results indicate that the proposed hybrid muffler and the phononic crystal duct possess low pressure loss values.

Aerodynamic noise transmits through automotive window, causing great adverse influence on comfortability and noise-vibration-harshness (NVH) performance. However, the complicated external turbulent air flow, as well as the internal metal-rubber nonlinear sealing constraint, makes the mechanism of aerodynamic noise generation and transmission very difficult. Regarding the complex exterior aerodynamics-induced load and nonlinear metal-rubber interaction and constraint, an efficient two-step numerical prediction method is presented in order to study the mechanism of its generation and transmission. The first step uses the commercial ANSYS-Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis based on the shear stress transport (SST) - turbulence kinetic energy (k) - the rate of dissipation of turbulence kinetic energy ε (epsilon) model and Lighthill’s noise source theory.

The effect of jet geometry on flow, heat transfer and defrosting characteristics was numerically investigated for elliptic and rectangular impinging jets on an automobile windshield. Initially, various turbulence models within the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package FLUENT were employed and validated for a single jet, and the results indicated that the impinging jet heat transfer was more accurately predicted by the SST k -ω turbulence model, which was then utilized for this study. The aspect ratios (AR) of elliptic and rectangular jets were respectively 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0, with jet-to-target spacing h/d=2, 4 and jet-to-jet spacing c/d=4, and all those situations were numerically analyzed with the same air mass flow and jet open area. It was observed that the heat transfer coefficient and defrosting performance of the inclined windshield were significantly affected by the shape of the jet, and the best results were obtained with the elliptic jet arrangements.

The improvement of environmental performance by gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine is remarkable. But the gas mixture formation process, which greatly affects the combustion of direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines, still has a lot of areas left unclear. In this paper, a CFD model of air intake, fuel spray atomization and mixture formation process of a certain GDI engine was developed and experimentally verified for DISI injection study. The effects of injector spray layout and injection strategy on mixture quality of DISI engine were analyzed by respective simulation of three different injectors T1470, T1471, T1472. Results show that the mixture quality can be improved with appropriate injector spray orifices layout.

As the most power-consuming component of the fuel cell system, the compressor directly affects the efficiency of the system. Using turbines to recover energy from the exhaust gas, has become a feasible means to improve the fuel cell system’s efficiency. Previous designs are mainly based on high-temperature (>523.15 K) gas. However, the exhaust gas temperature of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell is only about 348.15 K, which is much lower than the working fluid temperature of typical turbines (such as those used in internal combustion engine). In this paper, a turbine rotor for a 100kW fuel cell system was designed. The influences of non-design structural parameters including blade inlet incline angle, blade thickness, blade tip clearance and blade number on the aerodynamic performance and internal flow of the rotor are investigated. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model of the rotor single flow is established to predict the turbine aerodynamic performance.

Gas purge is considered as an essential shutdown process for a PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell), especially in subfreezing temperature. The water flooding phenomenon inside fuel cell flow channel have a marked impact on performance in normal operating condition. In addition, the residual water freezes in the subzero temperature, thus blocking the mass transfer from flow channel to porous media. Therefore, the gas purge course is of primary importance for improvement of performance and durability. The water droplet residing in the flow channel can be purged out due to shearing force of gas. In fact, the flow channel is not completely flat due to surface roughness of gas diffusion layer (GDL), meaning the water droplet may climb over obstacles. Moreover, the water droplet may block the flow channel and then be sheared into films on the surface of GDL.

Numerical analysis of thermal efficiency improvement up to 45% of an 1.8-liter turbocharged direct-injection (DI) gasoline engine was conducted in this study in response to the need of improving vehicle fuel economy. 1D thermodynamics simulations and 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling were carried out to investigate the technical approaches for improving engine thermal efficiency. Effects of various technologies on the improvement in the engine performance were evaluated, and then the technical routes to achieve 41% and 45% brake thermal efficiency were summarized, respectively. It is concluded that 41% thermal efficiency can be reached under stoichiometric combustion conditions, while it is expected lean burn technology is needed for the target of 45% thermal efficiency. The effects of high tumble intake flow on accelerating burning speed and of high compression ratio on intensifying knocking were analyzed.

Electric centrifugal air compressor is one of the most important auxiliary components for the fuel cell engine, which has great impacts on the system efficiency, cost and compactness. However, the centrifugal compressor works at an ultra-high speed for a long time, which poses a great challenge to the lives of motor, bearing and seal. Therefore, reducing the rotating speed of the impeller and maintaining high pressure ratio and high efficiency are important issues for aerodynamic design of the compressor. In this paper, a centrifugal compressor rotor for a 100kW fuel cell system is designed. Aiming at reducing the rotating speed, the influences of three key structural parameters including inlet blade angle, outlet blade angle and blade outlet radius on performance are investigated. The aerodynamic performance of the compressor is predicted using the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) tools.

Ammonia is employed as the carbon-free fuel in the future engine, which is consistent with the requirements of the current national dual-carbon policy. However, the great amount of NOx and unburned NH3/H2 in the exhaust emissions is produced from combustion of ammonia and is one kind of the most strictly controlled pollutants in the emission regulation. This paper aims to investigate the NOx and unburned NH3/H2 generative process and emission characteristics by CFD simulation during the engine combustion. The results show that the unburned ammonia and hydrogen emissions increase with an increase of equivalence ratio and hydrogen blending ratio. In contrast, the emission concentrations of NOx, NO, and NO2 decrease with the increasing of equivalence ratio, but increase with hydrogen blending ratio rising. The emission concentration of N2O is highly sensitive to the O/H group and temperature, and it is precisely opposite to that of NO and NO2.

The roof sensor system is an indispensable part of intelligent vehicles to observe the environment, however, it deteriorates the aerodynamic and noise performance of the vehicle. In this paper, large eddy simulation and the acoustic perturbation equation are combined to simulate the flow and sound fields of the intelligent vehicle. Firstly, test and simulation differences of aerodynamic drag and pressure coefficients on the roof and rear of the intelligent vehicle without roof sensor system are discussed. It is found that the difference in aerodynamic drag coefficient is 5.5%, and the pressure coefficients’ differences at 21 out of 24 measurement points are less than 0.05. On this basis, under the influence of the sensor system, the aerodynamic drag coefficient of the intelligent vehicle is increased by 23.4%.

In recent years, with the development of computing infrastructure and methods, the potential of numerical methods to reasonably predict aerodynamic noise in turbocharger compressors of heavy-duty diesel engines has increased. However, aerodynamic acoustic modeling of complex geometries and flow systems is currently immature, mainly due to the greater challenges in accurately characterizing turbulent viscous flows. Therefore, recent advances in aerodynamic noise calculations for automotive turbocharger compressors were reviewed and a quantitative study of the effects for turbulence models (Shear-Stress Transport (SST) and Detached Eddy Simulation (DES)) and time-steps (2° and 4°) in numerical simulations on the performance and acoustic prediction of a compressor under various conditions were investigated.

Exhaust gas recirculation technology is one of the main methods to reduce engine emissions. The pressure of the intake pipe of turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine is high, and it is difficult to realize EGR technology. The application of Venturi tube can easily solve this problem. In this paper, the working principle of guide-injection Venturi tube is introduced, the EGR system and structure of a turbocharged diesel engine using the guide-injection Venturi tube are studied. According to the working principle of EGR system of turbocharged diesel engine, the model of guide-injection Venturi tube is established, the calculation grid is divided, and it is carried out by using Computational Fluid Dynamics method that the three-dimensional numerical simulation of the internal flow of Venturi tube under different EGR rates injection.