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The acquisition of more authentic cylinder pressure data is the basis of engine combustion analysis. Due to the multiple advantages, quartz piezoelectric pressure transducers are generally applied to the measurement of the cylinder pressure. However, these transducers can only produce dynamic cylinder pressure data which may be significantly different from the actual values. Thus, the cylinder pressure data need to be corrected through a certain method, while different cylinder pressure correction methods will cause result divergences of the combustion analysis. This paper aims to acquire a proper cylinder pressure correction method by carrying out theoretical analysis based on the polytropic process in the compression stroke as well as the experimental research of the cylinder pressure of a turbocharged eight-cylinder diesel engine.

In order to meet the need of high pressure common rail diesel engine, calibration for injection quantity and basic MAP of electronic-controlled injector are made. Combining with testing data, influencing factors for consistency and identity of injecting fuel in electronic-controlled injector are analyzed, in the condition of small quantity, controlled-pressure undulation quantity and injecting pulse revising are presented to achieve the respective demand. Primary basic map for common rail pressure and injecting fuel are fixed with alterable step method, and calibration of fuel quantity MAP is made on bench test. Finally test of electronic-controlled injector equipped in diesel engine is finished, testing result showed that calibration process and method are reasonable.

In this work, an efficient and unified combustion model is introduced to simulate the flame propagation, diffusion-controlled combustion, and chemically-driven ignition in both SI and CI engine operation. The unified model is constructed upon a G-equation model which addresses the premixed flame propagation. The concept of the Livengood-Wu integral is used with tabulated ignition delay data to account for the chemical kinetics which is responsible for the spontaneous ignition of fuel-air mixture. A set of rigorously defined operations are used to couple the evolution of the G scalar field and the Livengood-Wu integral. The diffusion-controlled combustion is simulated equivalent to applying the Burke-Schumann limit. The combined model is tested in the simulation of the premixed SI combustion in a constant volume chamber, as well as the CI combustion in a conventional small bore diesel engine.

Fuel-injection schedules that use two injection events per cycle (“dual-injection” approaches) have the potential to simultaneously attenuate engine-out soot and NOx emissions. The extent to which these benefits are due to enhanced mixing, low-temperature combustion modes, altered combustion phasing, or other factors is not fully understood. A traditional single-injection, an early-injection-only, and two dual-injection cases are studied using a suite of imaging diagnostics including spray visualization, natural luminosity imaging, and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) imaging of nitric oxide (NO). These data, coupled with heat-release and efficiency analyses, are used to enhance understanding of the in-cylinder processes that lead to the observed emissions reductions.

A numerical study of micro-explosion in multi-component droplets is presented. The homogeneous nucleation theory is used in describing the bubble generation process. A modified Rayleigh equation is then used to calculate the bubble growth rate. The breakup criterion is then determined by applying a linear stability analysis on the bubble-droplet system. After the explosion/breakup, the atomization characteristics, including Sauter mean radius and averaged velocity of the secondary droplets, are calculated from conservation equations. Micro-explosion can be enhanced by introducing biodiesel into the fuel blends of ethanol and tetradecane. Micro-explosion is more likely to occur at high ambient pressure. However, increasing the ambient temperature does not have a significant effect on micro-explosion. There exists an optimal composition in the liquid mixture for micro-explosion.

A boost system with an auxiliary gas turbine used to recover diesel engine power at plateau conditions is proposed. System matching calculation, preliminary design, and performance simulation of the compressor with double parameter output are presented, as well as the preliminary design, flow simulation, and combustion process of the combustion chamber. Results show that the new system has better recovery performance and higher fuel economy potential than the simple charging scheme. For future research work, possible improvements and development direction are recommended.

There are a few different ways in which biofuels can be sourced, with the most popular coming from agricultural sources. An alternative approach is to utilize biowaste. An estimated 20 million dry tons of volatile organic compounds, or biowaste, is annually deposited in US municipal wastewaters. Most of this biowaste energy content is not recovered and, as a result, the biowaste could be a massive potential source of renewable energy. Biocrude diesel is converted from wet biowaste via hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL). Three types of feedstocks (algae, swine manure, and food processing waste) were converted into biocrude oil via HTL. From the previous experiments done in an AVL 5402 single-cylinder diesel engine, it was observed that the presence of 20% of HTL in the blend performed similarly during combustion to pure diesel. By studying these mixtures in a constant volume chamber, these observations could be compared to the results in the diesel engine.

This present paper described an experimental study on the combustion and emission characteristics of a diesel engine at idle at different altitudes. Five altitudes ranging from 550m to up to 4500m were investigated. Combustion parameters including in-cylinder pressure and temperature, heat release, fuel mass burning and so forth, together with emission factors including CO, HC, NOx and PM were tested and analyzed. The result of on-board measurement manifested that in-cylinder pressure descended consistently with the rising of altitude, while both the maximum in-cylinder temperature and exhaust temperature ascended with the altitude. It was found that ignition delay was lengthened at higher altitude, but the combustion duration became shorter. The crank angle towards 90% fuel burnt has hardly changed with the variation of altitude. As for heat release, the difference of slopes observed at different altitudes was quite slight.

Biodiesel fuels and their blends with diesel are often used to reduce emissions from diesel engines. However, biodiesel has been shown to increase the NOx emissions. Operating a compression ignition engine in low-temperature combustion mode as well as using multiple injections can reduce NOx emissions. Experimental data for biodiesel are compared to those for diesel to show the effect of the biodiesel on the peak pressure, temperature, and emissions. Accurate prediction of biodiesel properties, combined with the KIVA 3V code, is used to investigate the combustion of biodiesel. The volume fraction of the cylinder that has temperatures greater than 2200 K is shown to directly affect the production of oxides of nitrogen. Biodiesel is shown to burn faster during the combustion events, though the ignition delay is often longer for biodiesel compared to diesel.

Bio-butanol has been considered as a promising alternative fuel for internal combustion engines due to its advantageous physicochemical properties. However, the further development of bio-butanol is inhibited by its high recovery cost and low production efficiency. Hence, the goal of this study is to evaluate two upstream products from different fermentation processes of bio-butanol, namely acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) and isopropanol-butanol-ethanol (IBE), as alternative fuels for diesel. The experimental comparison is conducted on a single-cylinder and common-rail diesel engine under various main injection timings (MIT) and equivalent engine load (EEL) conditions. The experimental results show that ABE and IBE significantly affect the combustion phasing. The start of combustion (SOC) is retarded when ABE and IBE are mixed with diesel. Furthermore, the ABE/IBE-diesel blends are more sensitive to the changes in MIT compared with that of pure diesel.

As engine researchers are facing the task of designing more powerful, more fuel efficient and less polluting engines, a large amount of research has been focused towards homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) operation for diesel engines. Ignition timing of HCCI operation is controlled by a number of factors including intake temperatures, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and injection timing to name a few. This study focuses on the computational modeling of an optically accessible high-speed direct-injection (HSDI) small bore diesel engine. In order to capture the phenomena of HCCI operation, the KIVA computational code package has been outfitted with an improved and optimized Shell autoignition model, the extended Zeldovich thermal NOx model, and soot formation and oxidation models. With the above named models in place, several cases were computed and compared to experimentally measured data and captured images of the DIATA test engine.

Biodiesel fuel can be produced from a wide range of source materials that affect the properties of the fuel. The diesel engine has become a highly tuned power source that is sensitive to these properties. The objectives of this research were to measure and predict the key properties of biodiesel produced from a broad range of source materials to be used as inputs for combustion modeling; and second to compare the results of the model with and without the biodiesel fuel definition. Substantial differences in viscosity, surface tension, density and thermal conductivity were obtained relative to reference diesel fuels and among the different source materials. The combustion model revealed differences in the temperature and emissions of biodiesel when compared to reference diesel fuel.

Study and modeling of diesel combustion during transient operations is an important scientific objective. This is partially due to the fact that emissions under transient operations have aroused increasing attention by control groups during recent decades. The objective of this paper is to develop a combustion model to predict the peculiarities of transient combustion for developing and testing control strategies. To by-pass the complicated principles of transient combustion, the Neural Networks are applied to link the coefficients in an empirical combustion model with engine operating parameters. Finally, the Neural Networks combustion model would not only reflect the influence of turbocharge lag on combustion process during transient event, which cannot be predicted by its interpolation alternative, but also shown great potential for analyzing combustion characteristics during load increase transient event or other transient operations.

Based on MATLAB/Simulink, the ECU application software components library for diesel engine has been designed in this paper. The hierarchic and modularized components library is an open research platform for the model-based control software development. Using the components technology, the requirements of the diesel engine ECU application software have been analyzed, upon which the detailed components partition and the components library design have been accomplished. Besides, based on this components library, a control prototype for the diesel engine has been established quickly and verified through the Hardware-in-the-Loop test. The ECU software design and test process based on the components library show a good flexibility of the library, and it can improve the configurability and reusability of the software and increase the efficiency of the control software development.

In this paper, a new-type balanced opposed-piston folded-cranktrain (OPFC) two-stroke diesel engine is developed by Beijing Institute of Technology. OPFC has some potential advantages such as simple structure, good balance, compact, high power density and thermal efficiency. The structural feature of OPFC engine leads to the performance is different with the conventional engine. In order to study and verify the characteristics of this kind of engine, the folded-crank train dynamics, cylinders scavenging process and combustion process are investigated. The influence of parameters on the engine performance is investigated, includes the fuel injection timing, intake/exhaust port timing. In addition, the nozzle diameter is investigated as a main factor to affect the mixture and combustion process in the cylinder.

A multi-task control template has been established for diesel engine control system in this paper. By analyzing the function requirements and control strategies of electronic diesel engine control system, the data flow diagram has been obtained. Based on the mechanisms and characteristics of the RTOS as well as the design methods of real-time system software, modules in data flow graph has been divided further. So that the multi-tasks of the control system have been drawn. Then each task's properties have been designed. Afterwards, every task and the embedded RTOS have been transplanted into Freescale MPC5554 microcontroller. After that the multi-tasks have been tested and optimized in a Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) system of dSPACE AUTOBOX. The results show good reusability and real-time performance and it can increase the efficiency of the diesel engine control software development.

This paper presents a mapping of developing adiabatic two-phase R134a flow directly after the expansion valve until the flow is “fully developed” in a 15.3mm inner diameter pipe. Flow characteristics of separation distance, flow type in the homogenous region, void fraction as a function of tube length, and fully developed flow region void fraction and regime were quantified and described.

The ever-growing number of interacting electronic vehicle control systems requires new control algorithms to manage the increasing system complexity. As a result, torque-based control architecture has been popular for its easy extension as the torque demand variable is the only interface between the engine control algorithms and other vehicle control systems. Under the torque-based control architecture, the engine and AT coordinated control for upshift process is investigated. Based on the dynamics analysis, quantitative relationship between the turbine torque of HTC and output shaft torque of AT has been obtained. Then the coordinated control strategy has been developed to smooth the torque trajectory of AT output shaft. The designed control strategy is tested on a powertrain simulation model in MATLAB/Simulink and a test bench. Through simulation, the shift time range in which the engine coordinated control strategy is effective is acquired.

Soot emission, known as PM (particulate matter), is becoming a big issue for GDI engines as the emission regulations being increasingly stricter. It is found that ethanol, as an oxygenated bio-fuel, can reduce the soot emission when added to gasoline. In order to fully understand the effect of ethanol on soot reducing, the soot characteristics of ethanol/gasoline blends were studied on laminar diffusion flames. In this experiment, the blending ratio of ethanol/gasoline was set as E0/20/40/60/80. Considering the carbon content decreasing due to ethanol addition, carbon mass flow rate was remained constant. The two-dimensional distributions of soot volume fraction were measured quantitatively by using two-color laser induced incandescence technique. The results showed that ethanol is able to decrease the soot significantly, but the effect of ethanol on soot reduction is weakened with the increasing ethanol ratio.

An opposed-piston two-stroke folded-cranktrain diesel engine was studied in this paper. In order to achieve asymmetric scavenging, asymmetric angle between two crank throws were designed. However asymmetric crank-throw angle has direct effect on the piston dynamic, which affects engine performance. This paper investigated the characteristics of the piston dynamic on an opposed-piston two-stroke folded-cranktrain diesel engine; effects of the asymmetric angle on the piston displacement, velocity and acceleration were analyzed; further researches were done to studied the effect of piston dynamic on the gas exchange performance and in-cylinder performance. The results show that, larger asymmetric angle is positive for the scavenging efficiency but negative for combustion.