Search Results

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.

In a recent study, quantitative measurements were presented of in-cylinder spatial distributions of mixture equivalence ratio in a single-cylinder light-duty optical diesel engine, operated with a non-reactive mixture at conditions similar to an early injection low-temperature combustion mode. In the experiments a planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) methodology was used to obtain local mixture equivalence ratio values based on a diesel fuel surrogate (75% n-heptane, 25% iso-octane), with a small fraction of toluene as fluorescing tracer (0.5% by mass). Significant changes in the mixture's structure and composition at the walls were observed due to increased charge motion at high swirl and injection pressure levels. This suggested a non-negligible impact on wall heat transfer and, ultimately, on efficiency and engine-out emissions.

A new friction testing system has been designed and built to simulate the actual engine conditions in friction and wear test of piston-ring and cylinder liner assembly. Experimental data has been developed as Friction Coefficient / Crank Angle Degree diagrams including the effects of running speed (500 and 700 rpm) and ring normal load. Surface roughness profilocorder traces were obtained for tested samples. Mixed lubrication regime observed in the most part of the test range. New cylinder bore materials and lubricants can be screened easily and more reliable simulated engine friction data can be collected using this technique.

A new formulation is developed for the ignition delay (ID) in diesel engines to account for the effect of piston motion on the global autoignition reaction rates. A differentiation is made between the IDe measured in engines and IDv, measured in constant volume vessels. In addition, a method is presented to determine the coefficients of the IDe correlation from actual engine experimental data. The new formulation for IDe is applied to predict the misfiring cycles during the cold starting of diesel engines at different low ambient temperatures. The predictions are compared with experimental results obtained on a multi-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine.

A free piston, internal combustion (IC) engine, operating at high compression ratio (∼30:1) and low equivalence ratio (ϕ∼0.35), and utilizing homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion, has been proposed by Sandia National Laboratories as a means of significantly improving the IC engine's cycle thermal efficiency and exhaust emissions. A zero-dimensional, thermodynamic model with detailed chemical kinetics, and empirical scavenging, heat transfer, and friction component models has been used to analyze the steady-state operating characteristics of this engine. The cycle simulations using hydrogen as the fuel, have indicated the critical factors affecting the engine's performance, and suggest the limits of improvement possible relative to conventional IC engine technologies.

In an optically-accessible single-cylinder engine fuelled with hydrogen, OH* chemiluminescence imaging and planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) are used to qualitatively evaluate in-cylinder mixture formation. The experiments include measurements for engine operation with hydrogen injection in-cylinder either prior to or after intake valve closure (IVC). Pre-IVC injection is used to produce a near homogeneous mixture in-cylinder to establish a baseline comparison for post-IVC injection. To assess the effects of injection pressure on mixture formation, two injection pressures are used for post-IVC injection. For post-IVC injection with start of injection (SOI) coincident with IVC, mixture distribution is similar to pre-IVC injection and there are little differences between the two injection pressures. With retard of SOI from IVC, mixture inhomogeneities increase monotonically for both injection pressures.

In light-duty direct-injection (DI) diesel engines, combustion chamber geometry influences the complex interactions between swirl and squish flows, spray-wall interactions, as well as late-cycle mixing. Because of these interactions, piston bowl geometry significantly affects fuel efficiency and emissions behavior. However, due to lack of reliable in-cylinder measurements, the mechanisms responsible for piston-induced changes in engine behavior are not well understood. Non-intrusive, in situ optical measurement techniques are necessary to provide a deeper understanding of the piston geometry effect on in-cylinder processes and to assist in the development of predictive engine simulation models. This study compares two substantially different piston bowls with geometries representative of existing technology: a conventional re-entrant bowl and a stepped-lip bowl. Both pistons are tested in a single-cylinder optical diesel engine under identical boundary conditions.

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.

With the development of intelligent and electric vehicles, higher requirements are put forward for the active braking and regenerative braking ability of the braking system. The traditional braking system equipped with vacuum booster has difficulty meeting the demand, therefore it has gradually been replaced by the integrated braking system. In this paper, a novel Integrated Braking System (IBS) is presented, which mainly contains a pedal feel simulator, a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a series of transmission mechanisms, and the hydraulic control unit. As an integrative system of mechanics-electronics-hydraulics, the IBS has complex nonlinear characteristics, which challenge the accurate pressure control. Furthermore, it is a completely decoupled braking system, the pedal force doesn’t participate in pressure-building, so it is necessary to precisely identify driver’s braking intention.

The Electronic Stability Program (ESP), as a key actuator of traditional automobile braking system, plays an important role in the development of intelligent vehicles by accurately controlling the pressure of wheels. However, the ESP is a highly nonlinear controlled object due to the changing of the working temperature, humidity, and hydraulic load. In this paper, an accurate pressure control strategy of single wheel during active braking of ESP is proposed, which doesn’t rely on the specific parameters of the hydraulic system and ESP. First, the structure and working principle of ESP have been introduced. Then, we discuss the possibility of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) control based on the mathematical model of the high-speed switching valve. Subsequently, the pressure building characteristics of the inlet and outlet valves are analyzed by the hardware in the Loop (HiL) experimental platform.

Optical engines are often skip-fired to maintain optical components at acceptable temperatures and to reduce window fouling. Although many different skip-fired sequences are possible, if exhaust emissions data are required, the skip-firing sequence ought to consist of a single fired cycle followed by a series of motored cycles (referred to here as singleton skip-firing). This paper compares a singleton skip-firing sequence with continuous firing at the same inlet conditions, and shows that combustion performance trends with equivalence ratio are similar. However, as expected, reactant temperatures are lower with skip-firing, resulting in retarded combustion phasing, and lower pressures and combustion efficiency. LIF practitioners often employ a homogeneous charge of known composition to create calibration images for converting raw signal to equivalence ratio.

This paper has designed a real time control algorithm to use ISG motor actively compensate the torque ripple produced by the engine, to reduce torsional vibration. This paper consists of 3 parts. In the first section, this paper has introduced the research object and its modification for experiments. Then the development of control strategy is presented. The engine dynamic model is built, and real-time control with a feedforward unit and a feedback unit is derived. Encoder and cylinder pressure is used for engine torque estimator. Then the ISG motor output the counter-waveform to make the overall output smooth. In order to verify the effectiveness of the control strategy, the final section has established a test bench, where two experiments are carried out. One of the experimental conditions is to set the engine at a constant operating point, while the other is to crank the engine from 0 rpm to idle speed with ISG motor.

The objective of this work is to develop a strategy to reduce the penalties in the diesel engine performance, fuel economy and HC and CO emissions, associated with the operation in the low temperature combustion regime. Experiments were conducted on a research high speed, single cylinder, 4-valve, small-bore direct injection diesel engine equipped with a common rail injection system under simulated turbocharged conditions, at IMEP = 3 bar and engine speed = 1500 rpm. EGR rates were varied over a wide range to cover engine operation from the conventional to the LTC regime, up to the misfiring point. The injection pressure was varied from 600 bar to 1200 bar. Injection timing was adjusted to cover three different LPPCs (Location of the Peak rate of heat release due to the Premixed Combustion fraction) at 10.5° aTDC, 5 aTDC and 2 aTDC. The swirl ratio was varied from 1.44 to 7.12. Four steps are taken to move from LTC to ALTC.

The Electronic Mechanical Braking (EMB) system, which offers advantages such as no liquid medium and complete decoupling, can meet the high-quality active braking and high-intensity regenerative braking demands proposed by intelligent vehicles and is considered one of the ideal platforms for future chassis. However, traditional control strategies with fixed clamping force tracking parameters struggle to maintain high-quality braking performance of EMB under variable braking requests, and the nonlinear friction between mechanical components also affects the accuracy of clamping force control. Therefore, this paper presents an adaptive clamping force control strategy for the EMB system, taking into account the resistance of nonlinear friction. First, an EMB model is established as the simulation and control object, which includes the motor model, transmission model, torque balance model, stiffness model, and friction model.

Several mechanisms are discussed to understand the formation of both regulated and unregulated emissions in a high speed, direct injection, single cylinder diesel engine using low sulphur diesel fuel. Experiments were conducted over a wide range of injection pressures, EGR rates, injection timings and swirl ratios. The regulated emissions were measured by the standard emission equipment. Unregulated emissions such as aldehydes and ketones were measured by high pressure liquid chromatography and hydrocarbon speciation by gas chromatography. Particulate mass was measured with a Tapered Element Oscillating Microbalance (TEOM). Analysis was made of the sources of different emission species and their relationship with the combustion process under the different operating conditions. Special attention is given to the low temperature combustion (LTC) regime which is known to reduce both NOx and soot. However the HC, CO and unregulated emissions increased at a higher rate.

Stoichiometric dual-fuel compression ignition (SDCI) combustion has superior potential in both emission control and thermal efficiency. Split injection of diesel reportedly shows superiority in optimizing combustion phase control and increasing flexibility in fuel selection. This study focuses on split injection strategies in SDCI mode. The effects of main injection timing and pilot-to-total ratio are examined. Combustion phasing is found to be retarded in split injection when overmixing occurs as a result of early main injection timing. Furthermore, an optimised split injection timing can avoid extremely high pressure rise rate without great loss in indicated thermal efficiency while maintaining soot emission at an acceptable level. A higher pilot-to-total ratio always results in lower soot emission, higher combustion efficiency, and relatively superior ITE, but improvements are not significant with increased pilot-to-total ratio up to approximately 0.65.

This paper presents an integrated method for rapid modeling, simulation and virtual evaluation of the interface pressure between driver human body and seat. For simulation of the body-seat interaction and for calculation of the interface pressure, besides body dimensions and material characteristics an important aspect is the posture and position of the driver body with respect to seat. In addition, to ensure accommodation of the results to the target population usually several individuals are simulated, whose body anthropometries cover the scope of the whole population. The multivariate distribution of the body anthropometry and the sampling techniques are usually adopted to generate the individuals and to predict the detailed body dimensions. In biomechanical modeling of human body and seat, the correct element type, the rational settings of the contacts between different parts, the correct exertion of the loads to the calculation field, etc., are also crucial.

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of injection pressures and fuel temperatures on the secondary injection spray evolution at the end of injection from a multi-hole gasoline direct injection (GDI) injector by Mie-scattering technique. The results of this paper show that the overall injection process can be classified into five stages which are injection delay stage, main injection stage, dwell stage, secondary injection stage and ligaments breakup stage respectively. Especially, the secondary injection occurs at the end of main injection, which is abnormal and undesirable spray behaviors. During the injection, big droplets and ligaments are injected through nozzle orifices at low speed. As the injection pressure increases, the phase of the secondary injection advances, and the injection duration decreases. At medium injection pressures (at 6, 8 MPa), more quantity of fuel are injected as ligaments.

Mixture formation in an optically accessible hydrogen-fueled engine was investigated using Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) of acetone as a fuel tracer. The engine was motored and fueled by direct high-pressure injection. This paper presents the evolution of the spatial distribution of the ensemble-mean equivalence ratio for six different combinations of nozzle design and injector geometry, each for three different injection timings after intake-valve closure. Asymmetric single-hole and 5-hole nozzles as well as symmetric 6-hole and 13-hole nozzles were used. For early injection, the low in-cylinder pressure and density allow the jet to preserve its momentum long enough to undergo extensive jet-wall and (for multi-hole nozzles) jet-jet interaction, but the final mixture is fairly homogeneous. Intermediately timed injection yields inhomogeneous mixtures with surprisingly similar features observed for all multi-hole injectors.

Active collision avoidance can assist drivers to avoid longitudinal collision through active brake. Regenerative braking can improve the driving range and braking response speed. At this stage, conventional hydraulic braking system limits the implements of above technologies because of its poor performance of response speed and coordinated control. While the brake-by-wire system is a better actuator that can fulfill requirements of automotive electric and intelligent development due to its rapid response and flexible adjustment. However, the system control algorithm becomes more complicated with introduction of regenerative braking and active collision avoidance function, which is also the main problem solved in this paper.