The Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) have played a significant role in transportation system to date and are expected to retain a significant market share through to 2050, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Improving the efficiency of the ICEs is one of the most promising and cost-effective approaches to increasing highways vehicle’s fuel economy. The tools to address critical barriers to commercializing higher efficiency, lower emissions, advanced ICEs for passenger and commercial vehicles are increasingly important in the rapidly evolving automotive sector. In this research, a model based optimization strategy is developed for trade-off analysis of parts in Spark Ignition Internal Combustion Engines (SI-ICE). The trade-off analysis tool has been used as a complement to engine mapping to determine the operating region of an engine where a new part could lead to improvements in fuel efficiency, performance, and emissions. To build the engine models, a Design of Experiment (DoE) was developed for performing the engine tests. For each spark plug set, the engine tests were conducted twice with an acceptable control of the parameters that affect engine outputs. The engine torque, Break Specific Fuel Consumption (BSFC) and break specific NOx emission were considered as the engine responses. Engine models were built according to the two-stage modeling strategy by means of black box modeling techniques. The accuracies of the models were 96%, 95% and 92% for the engine torque, BSFC and NOx outputs respectively. For the optimization part, determination of the optimal spark timing for each spark plug was formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem searching for compromises among opposing objectives, i.e. engine torque, emission and fuel consumption. The optimization outputs were in form of Pareto fronts, enabling the selection of the best solutions in terms of different objectives by considering the higher level information. The resulted Pareto fronts of the two spark plugs were compared at different operating points of the Ford Coyote engine and results showed that the two plugs are comparable. The marginal difference was at low load and low speed condition, where the newly designed spark plug was better than the conventional design. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The demand for turbofan engine performance development is high in the military industry. However, to develop the engine, it is necessary to predict its performance, and engine testing is both time-consuming and costly. Therefore, simulation is an effective approach to predicting the engine’s performance. During this thesis, a low bypass ratio turbofan engine is created in the simulation tool Simulink to investigate the engine performance throughout different flight conditions and maneuvers. The engine model is constructed for the future fighter aircraft at SAAB Aeronautics. The development of a design point has received particular attention throughout the work. After that, the development of proven methods for estimating engine performance of other parts of the flight envelope, resulting in increased model fidelity and enabling simulations of the same engine type but under different conditions and flight cases. To summarize, the tests of the engine model are successful under various design characteristics, conditions, and flight cases. In addition, simulations of the performance evaluation of fighter aircraft engines have been accomplished.

Micro Combined Heat and Power systems or microCHP systems generate heat and electricity for a home. Stirling engines are widely used as prime movers in microCHP applications. Stirling engine is an external combustion engine having an enclosed working fluid (as helium) that is alternately compressed and expanded to operate a piston. The displacer shuttles the working fluid between the hot and cold ends. The piston is coupled to a transmission and to an electrical machine to generate power. Conventional Stirling engines are not controllable to a great degree. The piston and displacer are connected to the same crank and they maintain the same phase difference throughout the cycle. Also the piston and displacer are normally constructed to move in a sinusoidal fashion. The Active Stirling Engine is a new concept introduced in this thesis which has a free displacer. The displacer is driven separately compared to a coupled drive in conventional Stirling engines. The displacer motion can be non-linear with dwell at each ends of the stroke, opening up the possibilities to increase the pressure volume diagram which indicates the work done by the engine. A separately driven displacer also allows introducing phase control and stroke control to improve the controllability of a Stirling engine. This thesis examines the effect of non-linear displacer motion and phase control of the displacer on Stirling engine performance. Simulations are performed in Sage, the leading Stirling engine simulation software, to understand the effect of displacer phase control. A test rig is constructed with the actively controlled displacer connected to a linear machine controlled by a programmable servo. Heat is applied to the test rig though an electric heating coil. The test rig is charged with nitrogen at 20Bar pressure. The power piston is connected to a rotating electrical machine via the transmission. The rotating electrical machine is used to start the engine and to act as the generator. The test rig is instrumented to determine the linear position of the displacer and piston, angular position of the rotating electrical machine shaft, temperatures, pressures and flow. A LabVIEW™ based data acquisition system is set up to capture data from the test rig. Data is collected at various test cases. The simulation result is compared against post processed data. An efficiency improvement of 15% is achieved using this method and is demonstrated experimentally. Applications in micro combined heat and power systems utilising the improved efficiency due to non linear motion and controllability due to phase control are explored in this thesis.

Today the environmental issues are a lot on the agenda and the environmental awareness are more and more common. New laws and restrictions on engines emissions are enforced and the demand on the engines gets higher and tougher. This leads to the engine testing playing a more crucial part than ever. Engine tests are done using an engine dynamometer. The dynamometer loads the engine by, in many different ways, absorbing the power and torque generated by engine. The most important functions of a dyno are to convey the power from the engine to the dyno, to load the engine, to measure the power and torque generated by the engine and to remove the excess heat that is generated.  Husqvarna is a Swedish company that produces garden and forest cutting tools, their most famous products are their chainsaws. Husqvarna does an extensive amount of engine testing, long time testing, functional testing and field testing. Some functional tests, such as start-ability after use is done in a climate chamber where the humidity and temperature can be set. Today, loading a chainsaw in -25 °C is a problem due to the fact that the most used dynamometer at Husqvarna is a water brake that freezes in minus degrees. This master thesis will answer the question on how to, for small engine, simulate the load that occurs during normal use of the engine and how to develop a dynamometer suitable for Husqvarna’s needs? The focus when developing the dynamometer will lie on solving the problem with minus degrees and having a good detachable coupling between the dyno and the chainsaw. The result is a hydraulic oil dynamometer. A hydraulic pump is attached to the guide bar and chainsaw using a detachable key way coupling and bearings. By controlling restriction of the flow in the hydraulic system the load can be controlled and also ultimately the RPM of the chainsaw. The hydraulic oil works fine in the minus degree as long as the right oil with the right viscosity range is used although a problem with the small chainsaws are that they are not reaching the full RPM in -25 °C. Mainly because of the backpressure created by the components in the system. This can be solved by minimizing the hydraulic systems total flow restriction.   However this problem doesn’t affect the testing methods as long as the chainsaw easily can be disconnected and freed from the dynamometer and then be run to full RPM which the coupling between the pump and chainsaw enables.

Core engine icing has been recognized to affect a wide variety of engines since the 1990's. This previously unrecognized form of icing occurs in flights through high altitude convective regions and vicinity of thunderstorms. Engine icing events involve power loss or damage associated to the engine core, namely instabilities such as compressor surge, stall, engine rollback and even combustor flameout events. The effects on compressor performance are significant in understanding the response of the engine to atmospheric ice ingestion. A one-dimensional axisymmetric flow model is used to simulate the continuous phase through the compressor. The steady state operation of dry air is validated with an industrial database. By changing an exit throttle, the point where the dry compressor mass flow rate slowly starts to drop, is predicted. The stage that is the first to locally collapse, causing the remaining stages and eventually the complete compressor failure, is determined. The continuous flow model is then coupled with a Lagrangian model for the discrete phase in a framework that conserves mass, momentum and energy. From numerical simulations of the coupled, continuous-discrete phase flow model, it is observed that a rematching of the stages across the compressor occurs with increasing ice flow rates to accommodate loss of energy to the ice flow. The migration of the operating point towards the stall point at the rear stage eventually causes the compressor to stall. The onset of stall is characterized by initial oscillations followed by a rapid decay of pressures of the last stage with the instability traveling quickly towards the front of the compressor. Effectively, a reduction in the compressor stall margin is observed as the ice flow rate increases. Further, the relevance of factors such as blockage due to discrete particles and break/splash semi-empirical models in the icing physics, are analyzed through parametric studies. Conclusions are drawn that underscore the influence of the assumptions and models in prediction of the flow behavior in the presence of ice ingestion. Smaller ice crystal diameters have a greater influence on the gas flow dynamics in terms of a higher reduction in surge margin. The break empirical model for ice crystals and splash model for the droplets that are used to calculate the secondary particle size upon impact with rotor blades have a significant influence on the gas flow predictions.

Progress in conventional rocket engine technologies, based on constant pressure combustion, has plateaued in the past few decades. Rotating detonation engines (RDEs) are of particular interest to the rocket propulsion community as pressure gain combustion may provide improvements to specific impulse relevant to booster applications. Despite recent significant investment in RDE technologies, little research has been conducted to date into the effect of nozzle design on rocket application RDEs. Proper nozzle design is critical to capturing the thrust potential of the transient pressure ratios produced by the thrust chamber. A computational fluid dynamics study was conducted based on hotfire conditions tested in the Purdue V1.3 RDE campaign. Three geometries were investigated: nozzleless/blunt body, internal-external expansion (IE-) aerospike, and flared aerospike. The computational study found the RDE's dynamic exhaust plume enhances the ejection physics beyond that of a typical high pressure device. For the nozzleless geometry, the base pressure was drawn down below constant pressure estimates, increasing the base drag on the engine. For the aerospike geometries, the occurrance of flow separation on the plug was delayed, which has ramifications on nozzle design for operation at a range of pressure altitudes. The flared aerospike design, which has the ability to achieve much higher area ratios, was shown to have potential performance benefits over the limited IE-aerospike geometry. A new test campaign with the Purdue RDE V1.4 was designed with instrumentation to capture static pressures on the nozzleless and aerospike surfaces. These results were used to validate the results from the computational study. The computational and experimental studies were used to identify new flow physics associated with a rocket RDE important to future nozzle design work. Future computational work is necessary to explore the effect of different parameters on the nozzle performance. More testing, including with an altitude simulation chamber, would help quantify the possible benefit of new aerospike nozzle designs, including the flared aerospike geometry.

Increasing demands for lower carbon dioxide emissions and fuel consumption drive technological developments for car manufacturers. One trend that has shown success for reducing fuel consumption in spark ignited engines is downsizing, where the engine size is reduced to save fuel and a turbocharger is added to maintain the power output. A drawback of this concept is the slower torque response of a turbocharged engine. Recent hardware improvements have facilitated the use of variable geometry turbochargers (VGT) for spark ignited engines, which can improve the transient torque response. This thesis addresses the transient torque response through three papers. Paper 1 presents the optimal control of the valve timing and VGT for a fast torque response. Optimal open-loop control signals are found by maximizing the torque integral for a 1-d simulation model. From the optimization it is found that keeping the ratio between exhaust and intake pressure at a constant level gives a fast torque response. This can be achieved by feedback control using vgt actuation. The optimal valve timing differs very little from a fuel consumption optimal control that uses large overlap. Evaluation on an engine test bench shows improved torque response over the whole low engine speed range. In Paper 2, model based, nonlinear feedback controllers for the exhaust pressure are presented. First, the dynamic relation between requested VGT position and exhaust pressure is modeled. This model contains an estimation of the on-engine turbine flow map. Using this model, a controller based on inverting the input-output relation is designed. Simulations and measurements on the engine show that the controller handles the strong nonlinear characteristic of the system, maintaining both stability and performance over the engine’s operating range. Paper 3 considers the dependence of the valve timing for the cylinder gas exchange process and presents a torque model. A data-based modeling approach is used to find regressors, based on valve timing and pressures, that can describe the volumetric efficiency for several engine speeds. Utilizing both 1-d simulations and measurements, a model describing scavenging is found. These two models combine to give an accurate estimation of the in-cylinder lambda, which is shown to improve the torque estimation. The models are validated on torque transients, showing good agreement with the measurements. / <p>QC 20120928</p>

This thesis presents the design and construction of a low temperature differential (LTD) Stirling engine for electric power generation. The target energy sources were geothermal, industrial waste heat or solar heated water. These sources would supply a source temperature of around 90 °C. Assuming that the sink is kept at around 20 °C, the engine was designed based on a temperature difference of approximately 70 °C. The initial design and basic structure of the engine was completed in a previous project utilising first order design methods. The goal was to develop a low cost prototype engine capable of producing up to 500W electrical output power. A novel gamma type engine was proposed utilising a rotary reciprocating displacer and industrial steam piping to form a low cost pressurised chamber. This project concentrated on advancing the design and construction towards completion with particular emphasis on the electrical control, measurement/instrumentation components, and gas flow through the regenerator. At the completion of this project the displacer piston actuation system has been redesigned. In order to achieve the displacer’s specified 2 ㎐ actuation, both the displacer’s structure and the actuation system were altered. The displacer’s aluminium shell and foam centre were removed and replaced with a pine superstructure coated in depron foam, reducing the moment of inertia from 0.4488 ㎏ ∙ ㎡ to 0.0984 ㎏ ∙ ㎡. A secondary motor was added to the actuation system to increase the actuation power. The gearing ratio was also altered from 10:1 to 2:1 to increase the peak displacer speed. The regenerator was designed and built to suit the unusual wedge shape requirements of the original design. A ribbed structure was conceived to allow fluid flow to be manipulated within separate sections, producing an even pressure drop over varying regenerator lengths. Simulations were run to optimise both the number of sections and the mass of wire wool to be placed in each segment. The final regenerator design has axial ribs placed at radii of 93, 134, 192, 276 and 392mm, creating four sections. These sections are filled with 0.68, 0.97, 1.40 and 1.90kg of #0 mild steel wire wool. As Stirling engines are not self-starting the generator was required to be run as a motor when starting the Stirling engine. To achieve bidirectional flow of current within the starter motor/generator control system, a field oriented control (FOC) inverter from Texas Instruments was purchased and set up to run the 1kW, 3 phase, permanent magnet generator in both motor and generation modes. This will allow the Stirling engine to be brought up to speed with the generator operating as a motor and then switch to generation mode when the motoring current falls below a set limit. Both pressure and temperature measurement systems were developed, constructed and tested in order to collect information about the performance of the engine under operation. Three pressure transducer circuits were designed and constructed with measurement ranges of 10 ㎪, ±0.99 ㎪ and ±6.66 ㎪. These circuits were integrated with a PiocLog1012 analog to digital converter and PicoLog recording software. Eight K-type thermocouples were used for temperature recording. These were sampled with a Pico Technology TC-08 temperature thermocouple data logger which in turn was connected, via USB, to a computer running PicoLog Recorder software. Thus far all component testing has been carried out with test rigs that model the relevant parts of the engine. The displacer actuation system and phase angle control of the displacer and power piston has been tested. Temperature and pressure measurement systems have been independently tested. Motor/generator speed control and switching has been simulated and tested. Unfortunately completion of the engine assembly was not achieved within the scope of this project and therefore fully integrated testing of all components was not carried out. Once mechanical assembly is completed fully integrated testing of displacer actuation, piston position, generator speed control and measurement systems can be achieved.

The performance characteristics of a diesel fuel piloted syngas compression ignition engine are presented in this thesis. A stock Hatz 1D81 engine was converted to operate in dual fuel mode through the elimination of the governor system and addition of an in-cylinder pressure transducer and custom intake system to facilitate the mixing of the gaseous fuel and combustion air. The engine was run on a Superflow water brake dynamometer and benchmarked with diesel to compare against manufacturer specifications. This was followed by dual fuel operation on methane and syngas, with the results being compared through performance characteristics. When operated on methane, the engine attained higher peak in-cylinder pressures along with higher torque, power, and thermal efficiency values for equal equivalence ratios. It was necessary to use greater amounts of syngas to reach comparable results with methane due to the lower energy content of syngas. The ignition delay was greater for syngas, and the onset of knock occurred earlier with syngas in comparison to methane. The heat release, Q, was comparable for both fuels and the exhaust gas emissions were significantly lower for operation with syngas. With emphasis on clean engine operation, syngas operation proved to be viable due to its renewable nature, significantly lower exhaust gas emissions, equal heat release characteristics, and larger useable operating range when compared to methane. / Thesis (Master, Mechanical and Materials Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2012-05-28 15:02:49.227

Low friction lubricant development provides a worthwhile contribution to vehicle CO₂ emission reduction. Conventional low friction lubricant development focuses on empirical processes using out dated engine technology and old test methods. This strategy is inefficient and restricts the lubricant's potential. A new method proposed in the present research combines tribological simulations with rig, engine and vehicle tests. This approach provides insights undocumented until now. The contribution to CO₂ emission reduction from individual engine components on vehicle drive cycles that include warm-up is predicted using lubricants down to the new SAE 8 viscosity grade. A bearing model is used to design the lubricant's non Newtonian characteristics to achieve friction reduction. An isoviscous lubricant with a viscosity of 4.6 cSt is shown to achieve the minimum friction in the bearing. The research shows that by starting with lubricants having kinematic viscosities higher than this value, it is possible to improve lubricant performance by lowering viscosity index (VI), introducing shear thinning, or reducing the density and pressure viscosity coefficient. Conversely, for lubricants with lower starting viscosities it is shown that higher VI values, more shear-stable lubricants and higher densities and pressure viscosity coefficients are required. The model predicts that high oil film pressures occur in the bearing and cause significant local lubricant viscosity increase (300&percnt;), indicating that the lubricant's pressure viscosity behaviour is important here, despite the contact being conformal. Simulation and motored engine testing establishes lubricant behaviour in the piston-to-bore conjunction. This analysis identifies a poor correlation between measured and predicted values at low engine speeds. A rig-on-liner tribometer shows that this error is attributable to a deficiency in the simulation's characterisation of boundary regime friction. An oil pump test determines how a modern variable displacement oil pump (and its control system) responds to lowering viscosity. The hypothesis that low viscosity lubricants cause the parasitic load from this component to increase is disproven using this component-level rig test. Chassis dynamometer testing compares the CO₂ reduction performance of lubricant thermal management systems to the values achieved by reducing the viscosity grade. CO₂ reductions of between 0.4&percnt; and 1.0&percnt; are identified using a cold-start new European drive cycle (NEDC) with a 5W-30 preheated to 60&deg;C and 90&deg;C respectively. Reductions in CO₂ emissions between 0.4&percnt; and 1.2&percnt; are found on the NEDC by lowering the oil fill volume from 5.1 L to 2.1 L. For the unmodified case, a 3.7&percnt; reduction in CO₂ emissions is reported by reducing the viscosity grade from a 5W 30 to an SAE 8 in the NEDC. The performance of a novel external oil reservoir is simulated to understand its ability to retain oil temperature during the vehicle cool-down procedure. An oil temperature of 65&deg;C at the end of the soak period (following a prior test where the oil was assumed to reach 90&deg;C) is predicted by installing insulation to the reservoir and indicates that a viable method to achieve the CO₂ benefits identified through lubricant preheating tests exists. A full vehicle model combines the outputs from each of these sub-models to predict lubricant performance on the NEDC the new World-wide harmonized light duty test cycle (WLTC). This new approach provides a tool that enables next generation low friction lubricants to be developed. The model predicts that an SAE 8 lubricant can reduce CO2 emissions by 2.8&percnt; on the NEDC and 1.9&percnt; on the WLTC compared to a 5W-30. A theoretical experiment, where all lubricant related friction was deleted from the simulation, predicts that lubricant-related CO₂ emissions are 8.7&percnt; on the NEDC and reduce to 6.3&percnt; on the WLTC. These results indicate that the planned adoption of the WLTC in September 2017 reduces the potential contribution to CO₂ emission reduction from lubricants by 28&percnt;.