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Zero-dimensional heat release rate models have the advantage of being both easy to handle and computationally efficient. In addition, they are capable of predicting the effects of important engine parameters on the combustion process. In this study, a zero-dimensional combustion model based on physical and chemical sub-models for local processes like injection, spray formation, ignition and combustion is presented. In terms of injection simulation, the presented model accounts for a phenomenological nozzle flow model considering the nozzle passage inlet configuration and an approach for modeling the characteristics of the Diesel spray and consequently the mixing process. A formulation for modeling the effects of intake swirl flow pattern, squish flow and injection characteristics on the in-cylinder turbulent kinetic energy is presented and compared with the CFD simulation results.

As the late combustion phase in SI engines is of high importance for a further reduction of fuel consumption and especially emissions, the impacts of unburnt mass, located in a small volume with a relatively large surface near the wall and in the top land volume, is of high relevance throughout the range of operation. To investigate and quantify the respective interactions, a state of the art Mercedes-Benz single cylinder research SI-engine was equipped with extensive measurement technology. To detect the axial and radial temperature distribution, several surface thermocouples were applied in two layers around the top land volume. As an additional reference, multiple surface thermocouples in the cylinder head complement the highly dynamic temperature measurements in the boundary zones of the combustion chamber.

The oil supply of combustion engines today is typically realized by oil pumps with constant displacement. To secure the operational safety in hot idling these pumps are oversized, what causes low efficiency in most of operating speeds. IAV developed a vane-type oil pump, which allows to infinitely regulate the delivery rate. Because of no oil release over a pressure limiting valve the pump achieves a higher efficiency in a wide range of operation. The design of the theoretical delivery characteristic allows the calculated and particular increase of oil pressure to avoid critical operating conditions and to support hydraulically operated functions as variable camshaft timing.

The protection of pedestrians from injuries by accidental collision is a primary focus of the automotive industry and of government legislation [1]. In this area, scientists and developers are faced with a multitude of requirements. Complex scenes are to be analyzed. The wide spectrum of where pedestrians and cyclists appear on the road, weather, and light conditions are just examples. Data fusion of raw or preprocessed signals for several sensors (cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasonic) need to be considered as well. Accordingly, algorithms are very complex. When moving from prototypic environments to embedded systems, additional constraints must be considered. Limited system resources drive the need to simplify and optimize for technical and economic reasons. With all these constraints, how can the safety functions be safe-guarded? This submission considers scene-based methods for the development of vehicle functions from prototype to series production focusing on functional safety.

Global warming is a climate phenomenon with world-wide ecological, economic and social impact which calls for strong measures in reducing automotive fuel consumption and thus CO2 emissions. In this regard, turbocharging and the associated designing of the air path of the engine are key technologies in elaborating more efficient and downsized engines. Engine performance simulation or development, parameterization and testing of model-based air path control strategies require adequate performance maps characterizing the working behavior of turbochargers. The working behavior is typically identified on test rig which is expensive in terms of costs and time required. Hence, the objective of the research project “virtual Exhaust Gas Turbocharger” (vEGTC) is an alternative approach which considers a physical modeled vEGTC to allow a founded prediction of efficiency, pressure rise as well as pressure losses of an arbitrary turbocharger with known geometry.

This paper investigates an optimal design of a diesel engine and after-treatment systems for a series hybrid electric forklift application. A holistic modeling approach is developed in GT-Suite® to establish a model-based hardware definition for a diesel engine and an after-treatment system to accurately predict engine performance and emissions. The used engine model is validated with the experimental data. The engine design parameters including compression ratio, boost level, air-fuel ratio (AFR), injection timing, and injection pressure are optimized at a single operating point for the series hybrid electric vehicle, together with the performance of the after-treatment components. The engine and after-treatment models are then coupled with a series hybrid electric powertrain to evaluate the performance of the forklift in the standard VDI 2198 drive cycle.

The low-NOx standard for heavy-duty trucks proposed by the California Air Resources Board will require rapid warm-up of the aftertreatment system. Several different engine technologies are being considered to meet this need. In this study, a 1-D engine model was first used to evaluate several individual control strategies capable of increasing the exhaust enthalpy and decreasing the engine-out NOX over the initial portion of the cold start FTP cycle. The additional fuel consumption resulting from these strategies was also quantified with the model. Next, several of those strategies were combined to create a hypothetical aftertreatment warm-up mode for the engine. The model was then used to evaluate potential benefits of an air gap manifold (AGM) and two different turbine by-pass architectures. The detailed geometry of the AGM model was taken into account, having been constructed from a real prototype design.

The development and calibration of exhaust aftertreatment (EAT) systems for the most diverse applications of diesel powertrain concepts requires EAT models, capable of performing concept analysis as well as control and OBD system development and calibration. On the concept side, the choice of an application-specific EAT layout from a wide technology selection is driven by a number of requirements and constraints. These include statutory requirements regarding emissions of criteria pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHG), technical constraints such as engine-out emissions and packaging, as well as economic parameters such as fuel consumption, and EAT system and system development costs. Fast and efficient execution of the analysis and multi-criteria system optimization can be done by integrating the detailed EAT models into a total system simulation.

The startability of SI engines, especially of DISI engines, is the greatest challenge when using ethanol blended fuels. The development of a suitable injection strategy is therefore the main engineering target when developing an ethanol engine with direct injection. In order to limit the test efforts of such a program, a vaporization model has been created that provides the quantity of vaporized fuel depending on pressure and on start and end, respectively number and split relation of injections. This model takes account of the most relevant fuel properties such as density, surface tension and viscosity. It also considers the interaction of the spray with cylinder liner, cylinder head and piston. A comparison with test results shows the current status and the need for action of this simulation model.

For the NOx removal from diesel exhaust, the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) and lean NOx traps are established technologies. However, these procedures lack efficiency below 200 °C, which is of importance for city driving and cold start phases. Thus, the present paper deals with the development of a novel low-temperature deNOx strategy implying the catalytic NOx reduction by hydrogen. For the investigations, a highly active H2-deNOx catalyst, originally engineered for lean H2 combustion engines, was employed. This Pt-based catalyst reached peak NOx conversion of 95 % in synthetic diesel exhaust with N2 selectivities up to 80 %. Additionally, driving cycle tests on a diesel engine test bench were also performed to evaluate the H2-deNOx performance under practical conditions. For this purpose, a diesel oxidation catalyst, a diesel particulate filter and a H2 injection nozzle with mixing unit were placed upstream to the full size H2-deNOx catalyst.

A promising combustion technology for DISI downsizing engines is the Miller cycle. It is based on an early intake valve closing for the separation of effective and geometric compression ratio. Therefore IAV has prepared a turbocharged DISI test engine with a high geometric compression ratio. This engine is equipped with the Schaeffler “UniAir” variable valve train in order to investigate a variable Miller cycle valve timing in the turbocharged map area. The goal is to investigate whether and how a rapidly variable Miller cycle can influence the knocking behavior. Therefore its potential for a SI knock control can be evaluated. The investigated parameters in a steady-state engine dyno mode were the intake valve closing timing, the intake camshaft phasing and the ignition timing. A variable intake valve closing Miller cycle strategy, a variable intake camshaft phasing Miller cycle strategy and a state-of-the- art ignition timing strategy have been investigated.

Advanced SI engines for passenger cars often use the cylinder deactivation technology for dethrottling and thus achieving a reduction of fuel consumption. The gas exchange valves of the deactivated cylinders are closed permanently by a zero lift of the cams. The solutions for cylinder deactivation can vary in the kind of gas composition included in the deactivated cylinders: charge air, exhaust gas or vacuum. All these strategies have in common the frequent loss of captured charge mass from cycle to cycle. Their two-stroke compression-expansion cycle additionally intensifies this phenomenon. Thus, a significant decrease of the minimum cylinder pressure can cause an undesired entry of lubricant into the combustion chamber. The idea was to ventilate the generally deactivated cylinders frequently to compensate the loss of captured cylinder charge mass. The task was to keep the minimum cylinder pressure above a certain limit to prevent the piston rings from a failure.

The strong demand for diesel fuel is producing a surplus of gasoline fractions in Europe. Despite new vehicles using less energy, the rising volume of traffic will lead to more diesel being consumed. European legislation demands that renewable fuels cover 10% of energy consumed in the transport sector. The present strategy of dividing biofuels in equal shares between diesel and gasoline does not help to improve this situation. It seems reasonable not only to add FAME but also ethanol to diesel. Unfortunately, fuel blends containing ethanol cannot be used in existing cars without hardware modifications. This is because of ethanol's characteristics and well-known from the experience gathered with gasoline cars. As such, the first part of this study investigates material compatibility, focusing on corrosion and changes to the mechanical properties of the materials used in diesel engines.

Flow fields and fuel distribution play a critical role in developing the combustion process inside the cylinders of piston engines. This has prompted the development of measurement and diagnostic capabilities including laser techniques like Doppler Global Velocimetry (DGV). The paper provides an overview of the basics of DGV and the type of results that can be obtained. It also includes a short comparison to Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) which is a popular alternative method. Furthermore, it is shown that DGV can be used simultaneously in combination with droplet distribution visualization inside cylinders based on Mie scattering.

The development and calibration of modern combustion engines is challenging in the area of continuously tightening emission limits and the necessity for meeting real driving emissions regulations. A focus is on the knowledge of the internal engine processes and the determination of pollutants formations in order to predict the engine emissions. A physical model-based development provides an insight into hardly measurable phenomena properties and is robust against changing input data. With increasing modeling depth the required computing capacities increase. As an alternative to physical modeling, data-driven machine learning methods can be used to enable high-performance modeling accuracy. However, these are dependent on the learned data. To combine the performance and robustness of both types of modeling a hybrid application of data-driven and physical models is developed in this paper as a grey box model for the exhaust emission prediction of a commercial vehicle diesel engine.

In order to reduce the negative health effects associated with engine pollutants, environmental problems caused by combustion engine emissions and satisfy the current strict emission standards, it is essential to better understand and simulate the emission formation process. Further development of emission model, improves the accuracy of the model-based optimization approach, which is used as a decisive tool for combustion system development and engine-out emission reduction. The numerical approaches for emission simulation are closely coupled to the combustion model. Using a detailed emission model, considering the 3D mixture preparation simulation including, chemical reactions, demands high computational effort. Phenomenological combustion models, used in 1D approaches for model-based system optimization can deliver heat release rate, while using a two-zone approach can estimate the NOx emissions.

The homogeneous Diesel combustion is a way to effect a soot and nitrogen oxide (NOx) free Diesel engine operation. Using direct injection of Diesel fuel, the mixture typically ignites before it is fully homogenized. In this study a homogeneous mixture is prepared outside of the combustion chamber by a Cool Flame Vaporizer. At first the specification of the vaporizer is given in this paper. To determine the composition of the vaporizer gas an analysis using gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) was made. The results give an idea of the effects on engine combustion. Followed by, the vaporizer was adapted to a single-cylinder Diesel engine. To adapt the engine's configuration regarding compression ratio and inlet temperature range a zero dimensional engine process simulation software was utilized. The engine was run in different operating modes.

Specific shifting of load points is an important approach in order to reduce the fuel consumption of gasoline engines. A potential measure is cylinder deactivation, which is used as a study example. Currently CO2 savings of new concepts are evaluated by dynamic cycles simulations. The fuel consumption during driving cycles is calculated based on consumption-optimized steady-state engine maps. Discrete load point shifts occur as shifts within maps. For reasons of comfort shifts require neutral torque. The work of deactivated cylinders must be compensated by active cylinders within one working cycle. Due to the larger time constant of the air path the air charge must be increased or decreased in order to deactivate or activate cylinders without affecting the torque. A working-cycle-resolved, continuously variable parameter is prerequisite for process control. Manipulation of ignition timing enables a reduction of efficiency and gained work.

The latest legislative tendencies for on-highway heavy duty vehicles in the United States such as the feasibility assessment of low NOX standards of CARB or EPA’s memorandum forecast further tightening of the NOX emissions limits. In addition, the GHG Phase 2 legislation and also phased-in regulations in the EU enforce a continuous reduction in CO2 emissions resp. fuel consumption. In order to meet such low NOX emission limits, a rapid heat-up of the exhaust after-treatment system (EATS) is inevitable. However, the required thermal management results in increased fuel consumption, i.e. CO2 emissions as shown in numerous previous works also by the authors. A NOX-CO2 trade-off for cumulative cycle emissions can be observed, which can be optimized by using more advance technologies on the engine and/or on the EATS side.

The newest legislative trends enforce a significant decrease in CO2 emissions for commercial vehicles. For instance, in Europe a drop in fleet consumption of 15% and 30% is set as target by the regulation by 2025 and 2030. The use of carbon-neutral fuels offers possibilities regarding net-zero CO2 emissions - although not yet considered by the rules. Another challenging aspect is the drastic tightening of NOx emissions limits for future legislations, which is approved or being discussed both for the United States and for the EU. The current work describes the potentials of an innovative fuel, marketed as Gane fuel regarding performance, efficiency and emission behavior. First, the properties of the developed fuel are described: Gane is made from methanol blended with water and is tailored for diffusive combustion. The fuel blending is so defined to fulfill the combustion requirements.