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Mechanical load and thermal load are the two main barriers limiting the engine power output of heavy duty (HD) diesel engines. Usually, the peak cylinder pressure could be reduced by retarding combustion phasing while introducing the drawback of higher thermal load and exhaust temperature. In this paper, Miller cycle with late intake valve closing was investigated at high speed high load condition (77 kW/L) on a single cylinder HD diesel engine. The results showed the simultaneous reduction of mechanical and thermal loads. In the meanwhile, higher boosting pressure was required to compensate the Miller loss of the intake charge during intake and compression process. The combustion temperature, cylinder pressure, exhaust temperature and NOx emission were reduced significantly with Miller cycle at the operating condition. Furthermore, the combustion process, smoke number and fuel consumption were analysed.

Based on the principle of conjugate curve surface and the theory of hydrodynamic lubrication, the similar spherical spiral surface, which has the best lubrication effect, was obtained in the paper. Experiment show, this kind of frictional surface is lower 15% at power loss, and it is higher 13% at service life than the traditional frictional surface of piston ring, (such as barrel, stepped, cuneiform, rectangle and so on).

Three-phase sequential turbocharging system with two unequal-size turbochargers is developed to improve fuel economy performance and reduce emission of the automotive diesel engine, which satisfies wide range of intake flow demand. However, it results in complicated transient control strategies under frequently changing operating conditions. The present work aims to optimize the control scheme of boost system and fuel injection and evaluate their contributions to the improvement of transient performance. A mean value model for diesel engine was built up in SIMULINK environment and verified by experiment for transient study. Then a mathematical model of optimization issue was established. Strategies of control valves and fuel injection for typical acceleration and loading processes are obtained by coupled calculating of the simulation model and optimization algorithm.

Two-stroke engines have to face the problems of insufficient charge for short intake time and the loss of intake air caused by long valve overlap. In order to promote the power of a two-stroke poppet valve diesel engine, measures are taken to help optimize intake port structure. In this work, the scavenging and combustion processes of three common types of intake ports including horizontal intake port (HIP), combined swirl intake port (CSIP) and reversed tumble intake port (RTIP) were studied and their characteristics are summarized based on three-dimensional simulation. Results show that the RTIP has better performance in scavenging process for larger intake air trapped in the cylinder. Its scavenging efficiency reaches 84.7%, which is 1.7% higher than the HIP and the trapping ratio of the RTIP reaches 72.3% due to less short-circuiting loss, 11.2% higher than the HIP.

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.

In order to understand the spray impinging the lubricant oil on the piston or cylinder wall in GDI engine, the Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) method was used to observe the phenomenon of the fuel droplets impact oil film and distinguish the fuel and oil during the impingement. The experimental results show that the hydrodynamic characteristics of impingement affected by the oil viscosity, droplets’ Weber number, oil film thickness. Crown formed after impingement. The morphology after impingement was categorized into: rings, stable crown, splash and prompt splash. Low oil film dynamic viscosity, high Weber number or thin oil film can facilitate splash. Splash droplets consist of fuel and oil, and the oil is the main component of splash droplets and crown. The empirical formula of critical We number (We) is fitted. High dimensionless oil film thickness or low oil film dynamic viscosity can increase the proportion of fuel in the crown.

Combustion closed-loop control is now being studied intensively for engineering applications to improve fuel economy. Currently, combustion closed-loop feedback control is usually based on the cylinder pressure signal, which is the most direct and exact signal that reflects engine working process. Although there were some relatively cheap types of in-cylinder pressure sensors, cylinder pressure sensors have not been widely applied because of their high price now. Moreover, the combustion analysis based on cylinder pressure imposes high requirements on the information acquisition capability of the current ECU, such as high acquisition and analog-digital conversion frequency and so on. For developing a low price and feasible technology, a new engine information feedback method based on model calculation and crank angular velocity measurement was proposed. A simplified combustion model was operated in ECU for the real-time calculation of cylinder pressure and combustion parameters.

Downsizing as a main-stream technology was widely used for design of future diesel engines in order to meet the increasingly stringent demands of emissions regulation and reduction of CO2 production. Design of intake system faces a considerable challenge accordingly. Discharge coefficient and swirl ratio as two main factors of intake port design have been widely investigated by researchers. However, these two parameters indicate a trade-off relationship. Therefore, it is difficult for a classical intake system to achieve a good balance between sufficient air charge and decent air-fuel radial mixing quality. A 1 L twin-intake-port single-cylinder diesel engine was studied in this paper. A swirl control valve designed to adjust the effective flow area of the filling port, was installed between the intake manifold and the intake filling port in order to achieve variation of swirl ratio. And there is no control valve for the intake spiral port.

Reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) is a potential combustion strategy to achieve high engine efficiency with ultra-low NOx and soot emissions. Fuel stratification can be used to control the heat release rate of RCCI combustion. But the in-cylinder combustion process of the RCCI under different fuel stratification degrees has not been well understood, especially at a higher engine load. In this paper, simultaneous measurement of natural flame luminosity and emission spectra was carried out on a light-duty optical RCCI engine under different fuel stratification degrees. The engine was run at 1200 revolutions per minute under a load about 7 bar indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP). In order to form fuel stratification degrees from low to high, the common-rail injection timing of n-heptane was changed from -180° CA after top dead center (ATDC) to -10° CA ATDC, while the iso-octane delivered in the intake stroke was fixed.

Matching fuel injection and airflow motion is critical for the optimization of fuel-air mixing and combustion process in diesel engines. In this study, the effects of swirl flow on liquid droplet motion and the selection of swirl ratio, which are known as the major concern in organizing airflow motion, were investigated based on theoretical analysis of droplet trajectories. The evaporating droplets with various initial conditions are assumed to be transported in a solid-body-like swirl field, and their trajectories were derived based on force analysis. To evaluate fuel-air mixing quality, a new parameter with respect to fuel vapor distribution was proposed. Based on this methodology, the effects of swirl velocity, droplet size, as well as liquid-gas density ratio on droplet trajectory were discussed under diesel-engine-like boundary conditions.

The thermal and mechanical loads of the engine rise dramatically with the increase in engine power density, which places higher demands on the design of the piston. In this paper, the design development of a steel piston for a marine diesel engine belonging to 190 series heavy-duty diesel engines was studied. The design methods including material selection and structural design were used to finished the preliminary design. In the meanwhile, the design philosophies of the aluminum alloy piston and composite piston for the 190 series diesel engines were used for reference in the design process. The designed steel piston was tested in the engine durability bench test and simulated for reliability. The results showed that the failure of the steel piston occurred at the same position in both the test and the simulation. The cause of cracking in the steel piston was analyzed, and the insufficient strength of the local structure led to high-cycle fatigue failure.

In order to improve the fuel consumption and expand the range of low fuel consumption area of a 1.5L Atkinson cycle PFI engine, the effect of the intake manifold length and chamber shape on the engine performance is investigated by setting up a GT-power (1-D) and an AVL-Fire (3-D) computational model which are calibrated with experimental data. After this the new engine was transformed to the test bench to do the calibration experiment. The results demonstrate that the intake manifold case_1 (the length is 300mm, side intake form) matched with a new designed chamber improves combustion in cylinder with a range 1.6∼7.4g/(kW•h) reduced in fuel consumption of speed that has been studied; the case_3 (the length is 100mm, intermediate intake form) matched with the new designed chamber with a range 3.86∼7g/(kW•h) reduced in fuel consumption of speed that has been studied. Both case_1 and case_3 expand the range of low fuel consumption area significantly.

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.

Two-stroke cycle is one of the most effective methods to increase the torque and power output of a four-stroke engine due to the doubled firing frequency compared to four-stroke cycle at the same engine speed. As the two-stroke cycle lacks separate intake and exhaust strokes, the positive pressure difference between intake and exhaust ports is required to drive fresh charge into the cylinder, and is affected by intake port structures due to the different amounts of short-circuited fresh charge during scavenging process. To evaluate the effects of intake port structures on the high-load performance of a boosted poppet-valved two-stroke diesel engine, one-dimensional gas dynamic model and three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model were established and used to predict the high-load performance of the boosted two-stroke diesel engine with top-entry intake ports, inclined side-entry intake ports, and side-entry intake ports, respectively.

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combined with high compression ratio is an effective way to improve engines’ thermal efficiency. However, the severe thermodynamic conditions at high load may induce knocking combustion thus damage the engine body. In this study, advanced compression ignition knocking characteristics were parametrically investigated through RCM experiments and simulation analysis. First, the knocking characteristics were optically investigated. The experimental results show that there even exists detonation when the knock occurs thus the combustion chamber is damaged. Considering both safety and costs, the effects of different initial conditions were numerically investigated and the results show that knocking characteristics is more related to initial pressure other than initial temperature. The initial pressure has a great influence on peak pressure and knock intensity while the initial temperature on knock onset.

In order to improve the combustion and emissions for high-speed marine diesel engines, numerical investigations on effects of different combustion chamber structures combined with oxygen enriched air have to be conducted. The study uses AVL Fire code to establish three-dimensional combustion model and simulate the in-cylinder flow, air-fuel mixing and combustion process with the flow dynamics metrics such as swirl number and uniformity index, analyze the interactional effects of combustion chamber structures and oxygen enriched air against the experimental data for a part load operation at 1350 r/min, find the optimized way to improve engine performance as well as decrease the NOx and soot emissions. The novelty is that this study is to combine different oxygen concentration with different combustion chamber structures including the re-entrant chamber, the straight chamber and the open chamber.

In order to improve the combustion and emissions for high-speed marine diesel engines, numerical investigations on effects of different combustion chamber structures combined with intake air humidification have to be conducted. The study uses AVL Fire code to establish three-dimensional combustion model and simulate the in-cylinder flow, air-fuel mixing and combustion process with the flow dynamics metrics such as swirl number and uniformity index, analyze the interactional effects of combustion chamber structures and intake air humidification against the experimental data for a part load operation at 1350 r/min, find the optimized way to improve engine performance as well as decrease the NOx and soot emissions. The novelty is that this study is to combine different air humidifying rates with different combustion chamber structures including the re-entrant chamber, the straight chamber and the open chamber.

For uniflow scavenged two-stroke marine diesel engines, the main function of scavenging process is to replace the burned gas with fresh charge. The end state of scavenging process is integral to the subsequent compression and combustion, thereby affecting the engine’s fuel economy, power output and emissions. In this paper, a complete working cycle of a large marine diesel engine was simulated by using the 3D-CFD software CONVERGE. The model was validated by mesh sensitivity test and experiment data. Based on this calibrated model, the influences of swirl ratio and exhaust valve closing (EVC) timing on the scavenging process were investigated. The parameters evaluating the performance of scavenging process were introduced. The results show that, by adjusting the swirl orientation angle(SOA) from SOA=10° to SOA=30°, different swirl ratios are generated and have obvious differences in flow characteristics and scavenging performance.

Noise source identification and separation of internal combustion engines is an effective tool for engine NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) development. Among various experimental approaches, noise source identification using signal processing has attracted extensive attention because of that the signal can be easily acquired and the requirements for equipment is relatively low. In this paper, variational mode decomposition (VMD) combined with independent component analysis (ICA) is used for noise source identification of a turbo-charged gasoline engine. Existing algorithms have been proved to be effective to extract signal features but also have disadvantages. One of the key problems in presently used method is that the main components of the signal, i.e. the main source of the noise, are unknown in advance. Thus the parameters selection of signal processing algorithms, which has a significance influence on the identification result, has no uniform criterion.

This research presents an experimental study of the laminar burning combustion and emission characteristics of premixed methane -dissociated methanol-air mixtures in a constant volume combustion chamber. All experiments were conducted at 3 bar initial pressure and 373K initial temperature. The dissociated methanol fractions were from 20% to 80% with 20% intervals, and the equivalence ratio varied from 0.6 to 1.8 with 0.2 intervals. The images of flame propagation were visualized by using a schlieren system. The combustion pressure data were measured and exhaust emissions were sampled with a portable exhaust gas analyzer. The results show that the unstretched laminar burning velocities increased significantly with dissociated methanol enrichment. The Markstein length decreased with increasing dissociated methanol fraction and decreasing equivalence ratio.