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A dimensionless relationship that estimates the maximum bearing load of a 4-cylinder 4-stroke in-line engine has been found. This relationship may assist the design engineer in choosing a desired counterweight mass. It has been demonstrated that: 1) the average bearing load increases with engine speed and 2) the maximum bearing load initially decreases with engine speed, reaches a minimum, then increases quickly with engine speed. This minimum refers to a transition speed at which the contribution of the inertia force overcomes the contribution of the maximum pressure force to the maximum bearing load. The transition speed increases with an increase of counterweight mass and is a function of maximum cylinder pressure and the operating parameters of the engine.

Modeling plume interaction and collapse for direct-injection gasoline sprays is important because of its impact on fuel-air mixing and engine performance. Nevertheless, the aerodynamic interaction between plumes and the complicated two-phase coupling of the evaporating spray has shown to be notoriously difficult to predict. With the availability of high-speed (100 kHz) Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) experimental data, we compare velocity field predictions between plumes to observe the full temporal evolution leading up to plume merging and complete spray collapse. The target “Spray G” operating conditions of the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) is the focus of the work, including parametric variations in ambient gas temperature. We apply both LES and RANS spray models in different CFD platforms, outlining features of the spray that are most critical to model in order to predict the correct aerodynamics and fuel-air mixing.

Described in this paper is a component test methodology to evaluate the door trim armrest performance in an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) side impact test and to predict the SID-IIs abdomen injury metrics (rib deflection, deflection rate and V*C). The test methodology consisted of a sub-assembly of two SID-IIs abdomen ribs with spine box, mounted on a linear bearing and allowed to translate in the direction of impact. The spine box with the assembly of two abdominal ribs was rigidly attached to the sliding test fixture, and is stationary at the start of the test. The door trim armrest was mounted on the impactor, which was prescribed the door velocity profile obtained from full-vehicle test. The location and orientation of the armrest relative to the dummy abdomen ribs was maintained the same as in the full-vehicle test.

Microprocessors and microcontrollers are now widely used in automobiles. Microprocessor systems contain sources of interrupt and interrupt service routines, which are software components executed in response to the assertion of an interrupt in hardware. A major problem in designing the software of microprocessor systems is the analytical treatment of interrupt latency. Because multiple interrupt service routines are executed on the same CPU, they compete for the CPU and interfere with each other's latency requirements. Here, interrupt latency is defined as the delay between the assertion of the interrupt in hardware and the start of execution of the associated interrupt service routine. It is estimated that 80% of intermittent bugs in small microprocessor software loads are due to improper treatment of interrupts. Until this work, there is no analytic method for analyzing a particular system to determine if it may violate interrupt latency requirements.

Striving for sustainable transportation solutions, hydrogen is often identified as a promising energy carrier and internal combustion engines are seen as a cost effective consumer of hydrogen to facilitate the development of a large-scale hydrogen infrastructure. Driven by efficiency and emissions targets defined by the U.S. Department of Energy, a research team at Argonne National Laboratory has worked on optimizing a spark-ignited direct injection engine for hydrogen. Using direct injection improves volumetric efficiency and provides the opportunity to properly stratify the fuel-air mixture in-cylinder. Collaborative 3D-CFD and experimental efforts have focused on optimizing the mixture stratification and have demonstrated the potential for high engine efficiency with low NOx emissions. Performance of the hydrogen engine is evaluated in this paper over a speed range from 1000 to 3000 RPM and a load range from 1.7 to 14.3 bar BMEP.

High-speed video of combustion processes and cylinder pressure traces were obtained from a single-cylinder optical-accessible engine with a production four-valve cylinder head to study the mixture formation and flame propagation characteristics at near-stoichiometric start condition. Laser-sheet Mie-scattering images were collected for liquid droplet distributions inside the cylinder to correlate the mixture formation process with the combustion results. A dual-stream (DS) injector and a quad-stream (QS) injector were used to study the spray dispersion effect on engine starting, under different injection timings, throttle valve positions, engine speeds, and intake temperatures. It was found that most of the fuel under open-valve injection (OVI) conditions entered the cylinder as droplet mist. A significant part of the fuel droplets hit the far end of the cylinder wall at the exhaust-valve side.

A new algorithm for carrier removal, a key step in the Fourier transform method of fringe pattern analysis, is presented in this paper. The accuracy of frequency estimations is critical to carrier removal to avoid potential significant errors in the recovered phase. A new algorithm on Fourier transform and curve fitting technique is developed. To avoid an ill-conditioned result in solving the least-square problem, an orthogonal polynomial curve fitting algorithm is developed. A new system that combines projected grating moiré (PM) with shadow moiré (SM), recently designed and built with large dynamic range for both component level and board level warpage measurement for the reliability study of electronic packaging materials and structures, is presented and demonstrated.

Recent advances in x-ray spray diagnostics at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source have made absorption measurements of individual spray events possible. A focused x-ray beam (5×6 μm) enables collection of data along a single line of sight in the flow field and these measurements have allowed the calculation of quantitative, shot-to-shot statistics for the projected mass of fuel sprays. Raster scanning though the spray generates a two-dimensional field of data, which is a path integrated representation of a three-dimensional flow. In a previous work, we investigated the shot-to-shot variation over 32 events by visualizing the ensemble standard deviations throughout a two dimensional mapping of the spray. In the current work, provide further analysis of the time to steady-state and steady-state spatial location of the fluctuating field via the transverse integrated fluctuations (TIF).

A better understanding is needed of the electrostatic rotating bell (ESRB) application of metallic basecoat paint to automobile exteriors in order to exploit their high transfer efficiency without compromising the coating quality. This paper presents the initial results from experimental investigation of sprays from an ESRB which is designed to apply water-borne paint. Water was used as paint surrogate for simplicity. The atomization and transport regions of the spray were investigated using laser light sheet visualizations and phase Doppler particle analyzer (PDPA). The experiments were conducted at varying levels of the three important operating parameters: liquid flow rate, shaping-air flow rate, and bellcup rotational speed. The results show that bellcup speed dominates atomization, but liquid and shaping-air flow rate settings significantly influence the spray structure. The visualization images showed that the atomization occurs in ligament breakup regime.

A state-of-the-art spray modeling methodology, recently applied to RANS simulations, is presented for LES calculations. Key features of the methodology, such as Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR), advanced liquid-gas momentum coupling, and improved distribution of the liquid phase, are described. The ability of this approach to use cell sizes much smaller than the nozzle diameter is demonstrated. Grid convergence of key parameters is verified for non-evaporating and evaporating spray cases using cell sizes down to 1/32 mm. It is shown that for global quantities such as spray penetration, comparing a single LES simulation to experimental data is reasonable, however for local quantities the average of many simulated injections is necessary. Grid settings are recommended that optimize the accuracy/runtime tradeoff for LES-based spray simulations.

The particulate matter (PM) produced from a diesel engine-simulating combustor was characterized in its morphology, microstructure, and fractal geometry by using a unique thermophoretic sampling and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) system. These results revealed that diesel PM produced from the laboratory-scale burner showed similar morphological characteristics to the particulates produced from diesel engines. The flame air/fuel ratio and the particulate temperature history have significant influences on both particle size and fractal geometry. The primary particle sizes were measured to be 14.7 nm and 14.8 nm under stoichiometric and fuel-rich flame conditions, respectively. These primary particle sizes are smaller than those produced from diesel engines. The radii of gyration for the aggregate particles were 83.8 nm and 47.5 nm under these two flame conditions.

The development of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) has become a popular subject in academia and industry. Companies and cities are quickly realizing the opportunities that AVs can generate from Mobility as a Service to traffic safety. The challenges for the infrastructure to incorporate AVs as a viable transportation source are immense, from an outdated infrastructure to radical Smart-City designs. Historically, the transportation infrastructure has faced challenges from underfunding, economics, and much needed improvements. With the current infrastructure unable to support many of the services required by a fully connected network, a transformation will be necessary to meet growing mobility needs. The role of accelerating technology in data centers are key for production operations among industry leaders such as Amazon and Microsoft for real-time processing.

Perception in adverse weather conditions is one of the most prominent challenges for automated driving features. The sensors used for mid-to-long range perception most impacted by weather (i.e., camera and LiDAR) are susceptible to data degradation, causing potential system failures. This research series aims to better understand sensor data degradation characteristics in real-world, dynamic environmental conditions, focusing on adverse weather. To achieve this, a dataset containing LiDAR (Velodyne VLP-16) and camera (Mako G-507) data was gathered under static scenarios using a single vehicle target to quantify the sensor detection performance. The relative position between the sensors and the target vehicle varied longitudinally and laterally. The longitudinal position was varied from 10m to 175m at 25m increments and the lateral position was adjusted by moving the sensor set angle between 0 degrees (left position), 4.5 degrees (center position), and 9 degrees (right position).

An automotive powertrain system consists of several interactive and linked nonlinear systems. This research focuses on the coordination of Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engine, transmission and emission aftertreatment systems. The goal is to design an optimal control strategy for driving performance, emissions (HC, CO, NOX), fuel economy and smoothness when switching engine mode and when shifting gears, under both discrete and continuous limitations. A multivariable control strategy is used to compromise among all powertrain subsystems to achieve optimal overall performance. A nonlinear discrete dynamic programming approach is proposed for hybrid system optimization. The complex multivariable automotive control problem is then simplified into an optimization problem. The feasibility of automotive hybrid control via the discrete dynamic programming approach is demonstrated by results from many numerical simulations under different operating conditions.

A collaborative robot or cobot is a robot that can safely and effectively interact with human workers while performing industrial tasks. The ability to work alongside humans has increased the importance of collaborative robots in the automation industry, as this unique feature is a much needed property among robots nowadays. Rethink Robotics has pioneered this unique discipline by building many robots including the Baxter Robot which is exclusive not only because it has collaborative properties, but because it has two arms working together, each with 7 Degrees Of Freedom. The main goal of this research is to validate the kinematic equations for the Baxter collaborative robot and develop a unified reconfigurable kinematic model for the Left and Right arms so that the calculations can be simplified.

This study presents experimental and numerical examination of directly injected (DI) propane and iso-octane, surrogates for liquified petroleum gas (LPG) and gasoline, respectively, at various engine like conditions with the overall objective to establish the baseline with regards to fuel delivery required for future high efficiency DI-LPG fueled heavy-duty engines. Sprays for both iso-octane and propane were characterized and the results from the optical diagnostic techniques including high-speed Schlieren and planar Mie scattering imaging were applied to differentiate the liquid-phase regions and the bulk spray phenomenon from single plume behaviors. The experimental results, coupled with high-fidelity internal nozzle-flow simulations were then used to define best practices in CFD Lagrangian spray models.

The direct injection gasoline spray-wall interaction was characterized inside a heated pressurized chamber using various visualization techniques, including high-speed laser-sheet macroscopic and microscopic movies up to 25,000 frames per second, shadowgraph, and doublespark particle image velocimetry. Two hollow cone high-pressure swirl injectors having different cone angles were used to inject gasoline onto a heated plate at two different impingement angles. Based on the visualization results, the overall transient spray impingement structure, fuel film formation, and preliminary droplet size and velocity were analyzed. The results show that upward spray vortex inside the spray is more obvious at elevated temperature condition, particularly for the wide-cone-angle injector, due to the vaporization of small droplets and decreased air density. Film build-up on the surface is clearly observed at both ambient and elevated temperature, especially for narrow cone spray.

Double-hole nozzle and multiple injections have the potential for better fuel atomization and mixing in DI engine. In order to evaluate the behavior of the spray for the double-hole nozzles against traditional single-hole ones, high-speed spray visualization was carried out using a streak film camera and a copper vapor laser, and in combination with a long-distance camera when taking microscopic movies. The spray penetration and the cone angle were measured based on the images and compared for variable injection pressures, and for single and split injections, under ambient and elevated chamber pressure conditions. The results showed that the spray of the double-hole nozzle has comparable penetration but smaller cone angle when viewed from the nozzle end, compared to the single-hole nozzle with the same total hole discharge cross-sectional area. For microscopic view, it was observed that the interaction between the dual sprays is very dynamic.

Multi-hole DI injectors are being adopted in the advanced downsized DISI ICE powertrain in the automotive industry worldwide because of their robustness and cost-performance. Although their injector design and spray resembles those of DI diesel injectors, there are many basic but distinct differences due to different injection pressure and fuel properties, the sac design, lower L/D aspect ratios in the nozzle hole, closer spray-to-spray angle and hense interactions. This paper used Phase-Contrast X ray techniques to visualize the spray near a 3-hole DI gasoline research model injector exit and compared to the visible light visualization and the internal flow predictions using with multi-dimensional multi-phase CFD simulations. The results show that strong interactions of the vortex strings, cavitation, and turbulence in and near the nozzles make the multi-phase turbulent flow very complicated and dominate the near nozzle breakup mechanisms quite unlike those of diesel injections.

In Diesel engines, fuel injection plays a critical role in performance, efficiency, and emissions. Altering parameters such as injection quantity, duration, pressure, etc. influences the injector's performance. Changes in the injection system architecture can also affect the spray behavior. Understanding of the flow near the nozzle exit can lead to the establishment of correlation to spray characteristics further downstream, and eventually its combustion behavior in the engine. Because of its high density, the near-nozzle region of the spray is difficult to study using optical techniques. This near-nozzle region of spray from high pressure injectors was studied using the quantitative and time-resolved x-ray radiography technique. This method provides high spatial and temporal resolution without significant scattering effects.