Search Results

Spark knock pressure oscillations can be detected by a cylinder pressure transducer or by an accelerometer mounted on the engine block. Accelerometer-based detection is lower cost but is affected by extraneous mechanical vibrations and the frequency response of the engine block and accelerometer. The knock oscillation frequency changes during the expansion stroke because the chamber geometry is changing due to the piston motion and the burned gases are cooling. Spectrogram analysis shows the time-dependent frequency content of the pressure and acceleration signals, revealing characteristic signatures of knock and mechanical vibrations. Illustrative spectrograms are presented which yield physical insight into accelerometer-based knock detection.

An ionization probe head gasket (to IPHG) was used to investigate flame development in a 2.0L I4 engine with two in-cylinder fluid motions. A new technique was developed to display accurate flame contours at 2%, 10% and 50% mass fraction burned crank angles using the measurements of flame arrival time from the ion probes in conjunction with cycle simulations. The flame arrival and burn rate information is used to scale the relationship between flame radius and mass fraction burned from the cycle simulation to create accurate contours of the flame for each cycle. The tumbling motion inside the combustion chamber produced by the production intake ports convected the flame towards the exhaust side of the chamber. The geometry of the flame development was relatively unaffected by changes in speed and load.

The effects of engine operating conditions on the octane requirement and the resulting knock-limited output were studied on a single cylinder engine using production cylinder heads. A 4-valve cylinder head with port deactivation was used to study the effect of fuel octane, inlet air temperature, coolant temperature, air/fuel ratio, compression ratio and exhaust back pressure. The effect of the thermal environment was studied in more detail using separate cooling systems for the cylinder head and engine block on a 2-valve cylinder head. The results of this study compared closely with results found in the literature even though the engine and/or operating conditions were quite different in many cases.