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The target of substantial CO₂ reductions in the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol as well as higher engine efficiency requirements has increased research efforts into hybridization of passenger cars. In the frame of this hybridization, there is a real need to develop small Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) with high power density. The two-stroke cycle can be a solution to reach these goals, allowing reductions of engine displacement, size and weight while maintaining good NVH, power and consumption levels. Reducing the number of cylinders, could also help reduce engine cost. Taking advantage of a strong interaction between the design office, 0D system simulations and 3D CFD computations, a specific methodology was set up in order to define a first optimized version of a two-stroke uniflow diesel engine. The main geometrical specifications (displacement, architecture) were chosen at the beginning of the study based on a bibliographic pre-study and the power target in terms.

One of the most important safety issues for automotive engineering is to avoid any fire due to the ignition of flammable liquids, which may result from leaks. Fire risk is a combination of hot temperature, fast vaporisation and accumulation of vapor in a cavity. In IC engines, potentially flammable liquids are fuel and oil. To guarantee safety, flammable liquids must not come into contact with hot parts of the engine. Consequently, shields are designed to guide the flow path of possible leakages and to take any flammable liquid out of the hot areas. Simulation is a great help to optimize the shape of the shield by investigating a large number of possible leakages rapidly. Recent breakthroughs in numerical methods make it possible to apply simulations to industrial design concepts. The employed approach is based on the Lagrangian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method.

Reducing NOx tailpipe emissions is one of the major challenges when developing automotive Diesel engines which must simultaneously face stricter emission norms and reduce their fuel consumption/CO2 emission. In fact, the engine control system has to manage at the same time the multiple advanced combustion technologies such as high EGR rates, new injection strategies, complex after-treatment devices and sophisticated turbocharging systems implemented in recent diesel engines. In order to limit both the cost and duration of engine control system development, a virtual engine simulator has been developed in the last few years. The platform of this simulator is based on a 0D/1D approach, chosen for its low computational time. The existing simulation tools lead to satisfactory results concerning the combustion phase as well as the air supply system. In this context, the current paper describes the development of a new NOx emission model which is coupled with the combustion model.

This paper touches on the mass transport phenomenon in the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) of a gasoline engine air path. It presents the control-oriented model and control design of the burned gas ratio (BGR) transport phenomenon, witnessed in the intake path of an internal combustion engine (ICE), due to the redirection of burned gases to the intake path by the low-pressure EGR (LP-EGR). Based on a nonlinear AMESim® model of the engine, the BGR in the intake manifold is modeled as a state-space (SS) output time-delay model, or alternatively as an ODE-PDE coupled system, that take into account the time delay between the moment at which the combusted gases leave the exhaust manifold and that at which they are readmitted in the intake manifold. In addition to their mass transport delay, the BGRs in the intake path are also subject to state and input inequality constraints.

Fuel consumption in internal combustion engines and their associated CO2 emissions have become one of the major issues facing car manufacturers everyday for various reasons: the Kyoto protocol, the upcoming European regulation concerning CO2 emissions requiring emissions of less than 130g CO2/km before 2012, and customer demand. One of the most efficient solutions to reduce fuel consumption is to downsize the engine and increase its specific power and torque by using turbochargers. The engine and the turbocharger have to be chosen carefully and be finely tuned. It is essential to understand and characterise the turbocharger's behaviour precisely and on its whole operating range, especially at low engine speeds. The characteristics at low speed are not provided by manufacturers of turbochargers because compressor maps cannot be achieve on usual test bench.

RENAULT aims to become the first full-line manufacturer putting to market zero-emission affordable electrical vehicles and is therefore developing 100 % electric powertrains. NVH problems related to electric machine design have nothing in common with those of gasoline or diesel engines: electric whistling is a high frequency harmonic phenomenon, easily detectable due to the low background noise of a non-thermal vehicle and mainly perceived as very unpleasant by the customer. Therefore we have developed a coupled numerical simulation between electromagnetic and structural models, making it possible to understand the influence of magnetic parts design on noise and vibration level. Impact of the spatial and time coherence between magnetic pressures and vibration modes of the motor will be explained. The novelty of our approach is to already take into account the whole powertrain structure radiation, including reducer and power supply boxes.

As we are heading towards autonomous vehicles, additional driver assistance systems are being added. The vehicle motion is automated step by step to ensure passengers’ safety and comfort, while still preserving vehicle performance. However, simultaneous activations of concurrent systems may conflict, and non-suitable behavior may emerge. Our research work consists in proving that with the right coordination approach, simultaneous operation of different systems improve the vehicle’s performance and avoid the emergence of unwanted conflicts. To prove this, we gathered different control architectures implemented in commercial passenger cars, and we compared them with our control architecture using a unified reference vehicle model. The high-fidelity vehicle model is developed in Simcenter Amesim in a modular and extensible manner. This enables adding systems in a plug-and-play way.

Automotive suppliers provide multi-layer trims mainly made of porous materials. They have a real expertise on the characterization and the modeling of poro-elastic materials. A dozen parameters are used to characterize the acoustical and elastical behavior of such materials. The recent vibro-acoustic simulation tools enable to take into account this type of material but require the Biot parameters as input. Several characterization methods exist and the question of reproducibility and confidence in the parameters arises. A Round Robin test was conducted on three poro-elastic material with four laboratories. Compared to other Round Robin test on the characterization of acoustical and elastical parameters of porous material, this one is more specific since the four laboratories are familiar with automotive applications. Methods and results are compared and discussed in this work.

This paper presents a new 0D phenomenological approach to predict the combustion process in diesel engines operated under various running conditions. The aim of this work is to develop a physical approach in order to improve the prediction of in-cylinder pressure and heat release. The main contribution of this study is the modeling of the premixed part of the diesel combustion with a further extension of the model for multi-injection strategies. In phenomenological diesel combustion models, the premixed combustion phase is usually modeled by the propagation of a turbulent flame front. However, experimental studies have shown that this phase of diesel combustion is actually a rapid combustion of part of the fuel injected and mixed with the surrounding gas. This mixture burns quasi instantaneously when favorable thermodynamic conditions are locally reached. A chemical process then controls this combustion.

Engine knock is an important phenomenon that needs consideration in the development of gasoline fueled engines. In our days, this development is supported by the use of numerical simulation tools to further understand and subsequently predict in-cylinder processes. In this work, a model tool chain based on detailed chemical and physical models is proposed to predict the auto-ignition behavior of fuels with different octane ratings and to evaluate the transition from harmless auto-ignitive deflagration to knocking combustion. In our method, the auto-ignition and emissions are calculated based on a new reaction scheme for mixtures of iso-octane, n-heptane, toluene and ethanol (Ethanol consisting Toluene Reference Fuel, ETRF). The reaction scheme is validated for a wide range of mixtures and every desired mixture of the four fuel components can be applied in the engine simulation.

The current trend of downsizing used in gasoline engines, while reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, imposes severe thermal loads inside the combustion chamber. These critical thermodynamic conditions lead to the possible auto-ignition (AI) of fresh gases hot-spots around Top-Dead-Center (TDC). At this very moment where the surface to volume ratio is high, wall heat transfer influences the temperature field inside the combustion chamber. The use of a realistic wall temperature distribution becomes important in the case of a downsized engine where fresh gases hot spots found near high temperature walls can initiate auto-ignition. This paper presents a comprehensive numerical methodology for an accurately prediction of thermodynamic conditions inside the combustion chamber based on Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT).

CNG is one of the most promising alternate fuels for passenger car applications. CNG is affordable, is available worldwide and has good intrinsic properties including high knock resistance and low carbon content. Usually, CNG engines are developed by integrating CNG injectors in the intake manifold of a baseline gasoline engine, thereby remaining gasoline compliant. However, this does not lead to a bi-fuel engine but instead to a compromised solution for both Gasoline and CNG operation. The aim of the study was to evaluate the potential of a direct injection spark ignition engine derived from a diesel engine core and dedicated to CNG combustion. The main modification was the new design of the cylinder head and the piston crown to optimize the combustion velocity thanks to a high tumble level and good mixing. This work was done through computations. First, a 3D model was developed for the CFD simulation of CNG direct injection.

During the last fifteen years, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become one of the most important tools to both understand and improve the diesel spray development in Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). Most of the approaches and models used pure Eulerian or Lagrangian descriptions to simulate the spray behavior. However, each one of them has both advantages and disadvantages in different regions of the spray, it can be the dense zone or the downstream dilute zone. One of the most promising techniques, which has been in development since ten years ago, is the Eulerian-Lagrangian Spray Atomization (ELSA) model. This is an integrated model for capturing the whole spray evolution, including primary break-up and secondary atomization. In this paper, the ELSA numerical modeling of diesel sprays implementation in Star-CD (2010) is studied, and simulated in comparison with the diesel spray which has been experimentally studied in our institute, CMT-Motores Térmicos.

This paper proposes a method to detect an intake manifold leakage for a Diesel engine with a dual loop EGR system. The intake manifold leak has a strong impact on the engine performances by changing the intake manifold burned gas ratio. This fault is analyzed according to the control structure used and also according to the EGR operating mode. The paper proposes a diagnosis algorithm to detect the intake manifold leak in sequential or simultaneous use of the two EGR paths. The sensors considered are the mass air flow meter, the intake manifold pressure sensor, the exhaust equivalence ratio sensor and the differential pressure sensor (across the HP EGR valve). The diagnosis is based on a criteria that uses the redundancy between these sensors and air system models or estimators. The diagnosis threshold depends on the engine operating conditions as well as the sensor or model dispersions.

3D simulations of internal combustion engines are usually based on statistical approaches (RANS) that may not allow predicting cycle-to-cycle variations (CCV) or transient speeds because part of this information is lost by the averaging procedure. To simulate such phenomena, it requires time resolved approaches. Therefore, large eddy simulation (LES), which only involves a spatial averaging, appears to be a very promising tool. An LES approach is applied to simulate the flow field inside one cylinder taken from a real four-valve diesel engine mounted on an experimental particle image velocimetry (PIV) bench. Preliminary tests are carried out to evaluate the industrial code capabilities. A multi-cycle calculation is computed in cold flow, in order to evaluate its ability to simulate cycle-to-cycle variations (CCV).

The emissions performance of catalytic converters under different conditions of flow distribution was investigated. Computational Fluid Dynamics methods were utilised to model the maldistribution effects of different inlet cones. The effects of maldistribution on ageing, light-off and conversion were investigated using steady state tests on an engine bench. Emission testing was also conducted on a vehicle throughout ECE and EUDC test cycles. Maldistribution was found to have a significant effect on the efficiency of the catalyst during the early stages of the ECE cycle for both fresh and aged catalysts. The effects were less significant over later stages of the ECE cycle and throughout the EUDC except NOx where maldistribution did have an effect on the conversion at higher flow rates during the later stages of the test.

Atomizing systems must be able to form sprays with predetermined characteristics. There are affected by the shape of the injector as well as external conditions. Thus, in order to avoid numerous experiments, this is necessary to develop predictive atomization models able to deal with the complete atomization process. This can be done using a Eulerian model for primary break-up. This approach describes the flow continuously from inside the injector to the dispersed spray region. In this paper the Eulerian multiphase approach and the Eulerian single-phase approach are compared and the results lead to an intermediate quasi-multiphase approach for describing the spray core. Finally a transition zone permits to represent the diluted spray region by using the classical Lagrangian approach to benefit of the experience accumulated on this method, in particular for the vaporization and the combustion.

This presented paper deals with NOx trap sulphur poisoning and its regeneration. Sulphur poisoning has been studied with different SO2 gas concentrations under laboratory and engine test bench conditions. The sulphur poisoning studies have shown that the different NOx-traps available in the market have different behaviours toward SO2 poisoning and are all very sensitive to it. The results outline a non linear relationship of the NOx trap sulphur poisoning as a function of SO2 concentration. For instance, engine bench tests show that with a 50 and a 110ppm sulphur containing gasoline, a decrease of 50% in the NOx-trap storage capacity is respectively observed after 20 and 15 hours. With a gasoline containing 20ppm of sulphur, the same deactivation level is observed after 90 hours.