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The interest in electric propulsion of vehicles has increased in recent years and is being discussed extensively by experts as well as the public. Up to now the driving range and the utilization of pure electric vehicles are still limited in comparison to conventional vehicles due to the limited capacity and the long charging times of today's batteries. This is a challenge to customer acceptance of a pure electric vehicle, even for a city car application. A Range Extender concept could achieve the desired customer acceptance, but should not impact the “electric driving” experience, and should not cause further significant increases in the manufacturing and purchasing cost. The V2 engine concept presented in this paper is particularly suited to a low cost, modular vehicle concept. Advantages regarding packaging can be realized with the use of two generators in combination with the V2 engine.

The greenhouse gas emission reduction targets agreed at Kyoto represent a first step to reduce emissions in the long term in order to stabilize the earth's climate. The European Union has made an important contribution to the Kyoto agreement and the European Commission intends to develop a strategy to reach the Union's Kyoto target. This will require action in all sectors of the economy including the transport sector. Of the six gases covered by the Kyoto protocol, carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important as it accounts for about 80% of the total global warming potential of all six greenhouse gases. In the European Union, the share of transport CO2 emissions in total increased from 19% in 1985 to 26% in 1995. Road traffic is the most important source, and largely determines the trend in the transport sector; and road freight accounts for about 35% of transport CO2 emissions. As well as CO2, road freight transport causes considerable amounts of other pollutant emissions.

Society is moving towards climate neutrality where hydrogen fuelled combustion engines (H2 ICE) could be considered a main technology. These engines run on hydrogen (H2) so carbon-based emission are only present at a very low level from the lube oil. The most important pollutants NO and NO2 are caused by the exhaust aftertreatment system as well as CO2 coming from the ambient air. For standard measurement technologies these low levels of CO2 are hard to detect due to the high water content. Normal levels of CO2 are between 400-500 ppm which is very close or even below the detection limit of commonly used non-dispersive-infrared-detectors (NDIR). As well the high water content is very challenging for NOx measuring devices, like chemiluminescence detectors (CLD), where it results in higher noise and therefore a worse detection limit. Even for Fourier-transformed-infrared-spectroscopy-analysers (FT-IR) it is challenging to deal with water content over 15% without increased noise.

Legislative regulations and international agreements like the Paris Agreement have been prepared to enforce the effort to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Greater environmental awareness among customers and introduction of strict environmental regulations have challenged designers to consider the environmental impact of products together with traditional design objectives in the early stages of product design. An important environmental impact factor is the carbon footprint of a product because carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a main cause of the global climate change. An early assessment of the product carbon footprint is beneficial because at this stage, design changes are still possible with little effort and at low cost. Actually, there is no detailed methodology for a CO2 impact estimation in the early design phases available and very few researches have been conducted for the special segment of small powertrains.

Today mankind is using highly sophisticated tools which contribute to maintain the standard of living. Nevertheless, these tools have to be further improved in the near future in order to protect health and environment as well as to ensure prosperity. Two-stroke engines equipped with a carburettor are the most used propulsion technology in hand-held power tools like chain saws and grass trimmers. The shortage of fossil resources and the necessary reduction of carbon dioxide emissions ask for improved engine efficiency. Concurrently, customers demand for an easy usage with high performance at all operating conditions, e.g. varying ambient temperature and pressure and different fuels. Moreover, world-wide emission limits will be even stricter in future. The improvement of the emission level, fuel consumption and customer benefits, while keeping the present advantages of two-stroke engines, like high specific power and simplicity, are the goals of this research work.

Downsizing in combination with turbocharging currently represents the main technology trend for meeting CO2 emissions with gasoline engines. Besides the well-known advantages of downsizing the compression ratio has to be reduced in order to mitigate knock at higher engine loads along with increased turbocharging demand to compensate for the reduction in power. Another disadvantage occurs at part load with increasing boost pressure levels causing the part load efficiencies to deteriorate. The application of a variable compression ratio (VCR) system can help to mitigate these disadvantages. The 2-stage VCR system with variable kinetic lengths entails variable powertrain components which can be used instead of the conventional components and thus only require minor modifications for existing engine architectures. The presented variable length connecting rod system has been continuously developed over the past years.

In the course of the last few years a continuous increase of the injection pressure level of gasoline direct injection systems appeared. Today's systems use an injection pressure up to 200bar and the trend shows a further increase for the future. Although several benefits go along with the increased injection pressure, the disadvantages such as higher system costs and higher energy demand lead to the question of the lowest acceptable injection pressure level for low cost GDI combustion systems. Lowering injection pressure and costs could enable the technological upgrading from MPFI to GDI in smaller engine segments, which would lead to a reduction of CO2 emission. This publication covers the investigation of a low pressure GDI system (LPDI) with focus on small and low cost GDI engines. The influence of the injection pressure on the fuel consumption and emission behavior was investigated using a 1.4l series production engine.

The main target for the development of power sport engines is and will be in future the increase of the power-to-weight ratio. However, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is getting more and more important as future legislation and increasing customer demands ask for lower fuel consumption. One possible technology for CO₂ reduction which is widely used in automotive applications is downsizing by reducing the engine capacity and increasing the specific power by charging strategies. Focusing on power sport applications, like motorcycles, the automotive downsizing technologies cannot be transferred without major modifications. The essential difference to automotive applications is the extraordinary response behavior of today's motorcycles, as well as the large engine speed spread. Additionally, packaging and cost reasons exclude the direct transfer of highly complex automotive technology, like two-stage charging, cam-phasing, etc., to motorcycle applications.

Following the recent trend in the automotive industry, hybrid and pure electric powertrain systems are more and more preferred over conventional combustion powertrain systems due to their significant potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Although electric powertrains do not produce direct emissions during their operational time, the indirect emissions over their whole life cycle have to be taken into consideration. In this direction, the carbon footprint due to the electrification of the hand-held power tool industry needs to be examined in the preliminary design phase. In this paper, after defining the carbon footprint calculation framework, assumptions and simplifications used for the calculations, a direct comparison of the total carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) emissions of three equivalent power and range powertrain systems - a combustion-driven, a hybrid-driven, and a cordless electric-driven - is presented.

In the ongoing competition of powertrain concepts the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) will also have to demonstrate its potential for increased efficiency [1]. Variable Compression Ratio (VCR) Systems for Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) can make an important contribution to meeting stringent global fuel economy and CO2 standards. Using such technology a CO2 reduction of between 5% and 9% in the World Harmonized Light-Duty Vehicle Test Cycle (WLTC) are achievable, depending on vehicle class, load profile and power rating [2]. This paper provides a detailed description of the measurement approaches that are used during development of the AVL Dual Mode VCSTM and other VCR systems in fired operation. Results obtained from these measurements are typically used to calibrate or verify simulation models, which themselves are an integral part of the development of these systems [3].