Automotive Science and Engineering

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Nowadays, due to increasing the complexity of IC engines, calibration task becomes more severe and the need to use surrogate models for investigating of the engine behavior arises. Accordingly, many black box modeling approaches have been used in this context among which network based models are of the most powerful approaches thanks to their flexible structures. In this paper four network based modeling methods are used and compared to model the behavior of an IC engine: neural networks model (NN), group method of data handling model (GMDH), a hybrid NN and GMDH model (NN-GMDH), and a GMDH model whose structure is determined by genetic algorithm (Genetic-GMDH). The inputs are engine speed, throttle angle, and intake valve opening and closing timing, and the output is the engine brake torque. Results show that NN has the best prediction capability and Genetic-GMDH model has the most flexible and simplest structure and relatively good prediction ability.

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According to the Global Fuel Crisis, it seems necessary to use alternative fuel instead of gasoline. Since the natural gas is cheaper, have higher frequency than gasoline and less pollution, it is a suitable fuel. Many efforts have been done in order to replace gasoline with natural gas. One of the methods is to inject natural gas and gasoline fuel simultaneously and to use the benefits of both fuels. The purpose of this paper is studying natural gas and gasoline blend effect on engine power, torque and emissions. The simulated model was validated in different engine RPMs for gasoline and natural gas, were separately injected into the engine at full load condition. The results of simulation was had good agreement with experiments. The results show that by natural gas and gasoline Simultaneous injection power and torque have been reduced. NOX, HC and CO2 Pollutants change periodically, but their production level is generally lower than gasoline mode, but the CO pollutant increases.

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Modern diesel engines should have higher pollutant emissions standards with better performance and by using split injection strategies which could optimize the air – fuel mixture, this purpose could be achieved. After achieving the successful validation between modeling and experimental results for both single and double injection strategies, for the first time and in this paper, double injection strategies with new nozzle configuration were used in which number of nozzle holes were doubled and located below the previous holes and then double injection strategies were implemented in a case that for each pulse of injections upper or below holes were used, then this study focused on the effects of the new nozzle configuration holes angle in each pulse of injections. This study confirms that split injection could decrease Nox emission, because it has lower maximum in-cylinder temperature than single injection case due to its separate second stage of combustion, also results showed that using new nozzle configuration with two rows of holes could be more effective in decreasing pollutant emissions without any significant effects on engine performance.

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The constitutive relationships of the rubber materials that act as the main spring of a hydraulic engine mount are nonlinear. In addition to material induced nonlinearity, further nonlinearities may be introduced by mount geometry, turbulent fluid behavior, temperature, boundary conditions, decoupler action, and hysteretic behavior. In this research all influence the behavior of the system only certain aspects are realistically considered using the lumped parameter approach employed. The nonlinearities that are readily modeled by the lumped parameter approach constitute the geometry and constitutive relationship induced nonlinearity, including hysteretic behavior, noting that these properties all make an appearance in the load-deflection relationship for the hydraulic mount and may be readily determined via experiment or finite element analysis. In this paper we will show that under certain conditions, the nonlinearities involved in the hydraulic mounts can show a chaotic response.

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The usage of turbochargers in diesel engines has led to the downsizing of the motors as well as usage of the waste gates in turbochargers. Any dimensional reduction in turbochargers and appurtenant leads to an enhancement on the performance of internal combustion engines and in environmental problems in terms of aerodynamic, thermodynamic and mechanical specifications for both engines and turbochargers. For this reason, the efforts need to be focused on the design of turbochargers and their waste gates accurately, in order to maintain its benefits as much as possible. The extent of waste gate opening, from full opened to closed valve, is demonstrated by the limiting compressor boost pressure ratio. Ultimately, an optimum point of limiting compressor boost pressure ratio is obtained then an increase in the values of BMEP and engine power for the same fuel consumption in range of waste gate opening is achieved

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One of the factors that affects the efficiency and lifetime of spark ignited internal combustion engine is “knock”. Knock sensor is a commonly used to detect this phenomenon. However, noise, limits detection accuracy of this sensor. In this study, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method is introduced as a fully adaptive signal-based analysis. Then, based on weighting decompositions, a method for reducing knock signal noise to enhance detection accuracy of knock, has been proposed. Then, the presented method has been evaluated using recorded signals from four engine cylinders. Internal pressure of each cylinder were recorded and used as reference for knock detection. Test results verifies that knock detection accuracy improved by about 11.3%. The results of optimization method were consistent with our expectations and the weights of middle levels are higher than other levels, which means that the proposed method not only extracts the main frequencies of knock, but also assigns reasonable weights to them.

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Although, the Stirling engine (SE) was invented many years ago, the investigation on SE is still interesting due to variety of energy resources can be applied to power it (solar energy, fossil fuel, biomass and geothermal energy). In this paper, the thermodynamic cycle of SE is analyzed by employing a new analytical model and a new method is presented to evaluate output power and efficiency of real engines. Using the correcting functions; represent more accurate results for known Schmidt equations respect to adiabatic model. So without need to employing numerical methods and iterative solver programs, analogous results with accuracy and correctness of open-form solution-adiabatic method is obtained. The modeling of results of two methods is done by Non-linear Multiple Regression and new equations based on Schmidt equations with new correctness factors is presented. The correctness factors are function of structural and operational characteristics of engine.  Moreover, available output data of GPU-3 SE was compared. These comparisons show good agreement, indicating that the model is an appropriate method for modeling of SE outputs.

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Heat transfer in internal combustion engines is one of the most significant topics. Heat transfer may take place through thermal conduction and thermal convection in spark ignition engines. In this study, valve cover heat transfer and thermal balance of an air-cooled engine are investigated experimentally. The thermal balance analysis is a useful method to determine energy distribution and efficiency of internal combustion engines. In order to carry out experiments, a single cylinder, air-cooled, four-stroke gasoline engine is applied. The engine is installed on proper chassis and equipped with measuring instruments. Temperature of different points of valve cover and exhaust gases is measured with the assistance of K-type thermocouples. These experiments are conducted in various engine speeds. Regarding to the first law of thermodynamics, thermal balance is investigated and it is specified that about one-third of total fuel energy will be converted to effective power. It is also evaluated that for increasing brake power, fuel consumption will increase and it is impossible to prevent upward trends of wasted energies. In addition, it is resulted that, there is a reduction heat transfer to brake power ratio by increasing engine speed. Furthermore, it is found that, at higher engine speed, lower percentage of energy in form of heat transfer will be lost.

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In this paper we aim to develop a predictive combustion model for a turbocharged engine in GT-Power software to better simulate engine characteristics and study its behavior under variety of conditions. Experimental data from combustion was initially being used for modelling combustion in software and these data were used for model calibration and result validation. EF7-TC engine was chosen for this research which is the first turbocharged engine designed and developed by IKCO and IPCO in Iran. After analyzing necessary theories for predictive combustion model and required steps for calibration of CombSITurb model in software, one final set of multipliers were calculated based on different sets derived for each engine speed and engine operation was simulated with this combustion model. In addition to improved predictability of engine model, comparing results of predictive model with non-predictive model shows better accuracy especially at lower engine speeds and less tolerance of results for each engine speed.

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Car design incorporates many engineering sciences where today, have led to the use of advanced technologies in automobiles to provide more satisfaction and comfort for the passengers, increase the quality of vehicles, efficiency and more pleasure than previous cars. These issues can be categorized into two groups in general. In the first group, the effects and performance of components involved in vehicle vibrations are considered, and in the second group, attention is paid to the importance of joints and junctions of these components. Heretofore, in order to minimize vehicle NVH (noise, vibration and harshness), an exuberance of efforts have been done to raise the passengers comfort. In the meantime, it should be noted that the engine mounts play a considerable and serious role in reducing vibration exchanged between the engine and chassis. In designing the engine mounts, the most important concern is to balance the two opposite criteria that come into the car as a result of different vibration inputs (road and motor). Generally, vehicle engine mounts are used by three types of targets (motor bearing weight, motor vibration absorption, motor overloading, acceleration or braking). With the development of the automotive industry, the tendency towards the use of more efficient engine mount categories, has been prepared.
This article describes a concise functional overview of the engine mount in automobiles; it illustrates operating frequency range, relationship of the P and boundary diagram of engine mounts with other car collections, torque roll axis, positioning public types of the car’s engine mounts; and it also compares their operations. Afterwards, the structure and the basic functional of hydraulic engine mount are described as the most common engine mount categories. Finally, advantages and disadvantages of various types engine mounts with capability of use in the vehicle (including elastomeric, hydraulic (with inertia track or/and decouplier or/and bell plate (plunger), semi-active (switchable) and active hydraulic engine mount) are compared with each other.

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A combined hydraulic engine mount and buffer is proposed in this study for use in the mid-priced vehicle. In some vehicle design projects, an engine is selected to use in a new car design. To achieve the desired vibration conditions, the mount can be redesigned with exorbitant costs and long-term research. The idea of using a buffer in the combination of the conventional engine mount is to suggest a solution with affordable price which can improve mount vibration specifications. As a case study, the engine of Renault L90 (Dacia Logan), which name is K4M engine, is selected to use in the national B class automotive platform design. This automotive platform is designed at Automotive Engineering Research Center of Iran University of Science and Technology. The hydraulic engine mount is modeled in CATIA. Some tests are done to validate the simulation results. The conventional and buffer-equipped mount characteristics, which are determined by CATIA, is imported to Adams/Vibration software to evaluate the vibration behavior of the engine mounts. The results show that the use of buffer reduces the stiffness of mount, which should be 2 to 3 times lower than engine's frequency excitation. In some directions, the buffer-equipped mount has a better modal energy and isolation characteristics.

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The thermal balance analysis is a useful method to determine energy distribution and efficiency of internal combustion (IC) engines. In engines cooling concepts, estimation of heat transfer to brake power ratio, as one of the most significant performance characteristics, is highly demanded. In this paper, investigation of energy balance and derivation of specific heat rejection is carried out experimentally and numerically. Experiments are carried out on an air-cooled, single cylinder, four-stroke gasoline IC engine. The engine is simulated numerically and after validation with experimental data, the code is run to find out total and instantaneous thermal balance of engine. Results indicate that about one-third of fuel energy is converted to brake power and major part of energy is dissipated through exhaust and heat transfer. Experimental and numerical results show that by increasing engine speed, heat transfer to brake power ratio decreases. It is also observed that increasing engine speed leads to increase of exhaust power to brake power ratio. Finally two correlations for estimation of heat transfer and exhaust power to brake power ratios are obtained.

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Premature combustion that affects outputs, thermal efficiencies and lifetimes of internal combustion engine is called “knock effect”. However knock signal detection based on acoustic sensor is a challenging task due to existing of noise in the same frequency spectrum. Experimental results revealed that vibration signals, generated from knock, has certain frequencies related to vibration resonance modes of the combustion chamber. In this article, a new method for knock detection based on resonance frequency analysis of the knock sensor signal is introduced. More specifically at higher engine speed, where there is additional excitation of resonance frequencies, continuous wavelet transform has been proposed as an effective and applicative tool for knock detection and a formula for knock detection threshold based on this method is suggested. Measurement results demonstrate that this technique provide 15% higher accuracy in knock detection comparing to conventional method.


 

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In order to lowering level of emissions of internal combustion engines (ICEs), they should be optimally controlled. However, ICEs operate under numerous operating conditions, which in turn makes it difficult to design controller for such nonlinear systems. In this article, a generalized unique controller for idle speed control under whole loading conditions is designed. In the current study, instead of tedious time-consuming trial-and-error based methods, soft computing techniques are employed to tune a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller which controls idle speed of engine. Since model based design technique is employed, a mean value model (MVM) is taken advantage due to its evidenced merits. Moreover, a brief introduction to the selected meta-heuristics is given followed by a flowchart to show how the engine model is linked to the optimization algorithms. A set point of 750 rpm is fed to the system, and the weighted sum of the three characteristics of mean squared error, control energy, and percent overshoot of the control system is set to the problem objective function to be minimized. It is evidenced that of all the examined meta-heuristics, Bees Algorithm (BA) converges to a better solution. Finally, to consider the effectiveness of the developed optimal controllers in disturbance rejection, they are implemented to the engine MVM model. The results of the research indicate, all the four optimally designed control systems, albeit the intermediate superiority, are of conspicuous success in compensating for the input disturbances of the load torque.

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This paper investigates 3D simulation of fluid flow in a centrifugal pump from the Detroit Diesel company to extract possible engine cooling trends.  The velocity and pressure profile of water, the coolant, is analyzed and the characteristic curves of the pump are derived. This provides a useful evaluation of the pump performance at all working conditions. For this aim, a computational fluid dynamic model is developed using ANSYS CFX for a wide span of flow rates and a number of shaft angular velocities. The variation of constituting parameters are examined using dimension-less descriptive parameters of flow, head and power coefficients, finally, the efficiency of the pump is examined. In this analysis, sst-k-w turbulent model is employed which is a combination of two different models for pumps and turbomachines. Numerical results show that prolonged cooling duty cycles of the vehicle should accompany a flow factor of 10%. In addition, the peak of the vehicle’s loading should match the maximum efficiency of the pump that can be increased to 62% by augmentation of flow rate and flow coefficient.

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Pollutant emissions from diesel engines are significantly affected by fuel injection strategies that could reduce NOx and Soot emissions. For the first time and in this study, numerical simulations were performed to consider the influences of changing the injection duration in each pulse of the double injection strategies on in-cylinder parameters and pollutant emissions. Results confirmed that double injection strategies could influence the in-cylinder temperature, which leads to a reduction in NOx and soot emissions. Additionally, it is seen that decreasing the injection duration could increase the in-cylinder peak pressure and temperature. It could also reduce the soot emission owing to the better fuel atomization. Moreover, RATE+0.5CA case, which injection duration for each pulse increases 0.5 CA, was selected to be the optimum case in reduction of pollutant emissions.
 

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In internal combustion engines, exhaust valve and its seat gain considerable temperature as the hot gases exit through them. So, the rate of heat transfer should be under control. In this study, the contact heat transfer coefficient has been estimated. An experimental study on an Air-Cooled internal combustion engine cylinder head has been considered. Using the measured temperatures of sensors located in specific locations of the exhaust valve and the seat and the method of linear extrapolation, the surface contact temperatures and constant and periodic contact heat transfer coefficient were calculated. Also, a sensitivity analysis has been done to study the effects of different parameters of contact pressure, contact frequency, heat flux and cooling air speed on thermal contact conductance. The results show that between the major four considered parameters, the thermal contact conductance is more sensitive to the contact pressure, then the contact frequency, heat flux and the cooling air speed are the most affecting parameters on thermal contact resistance.

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In this research, a high-temperature Rankin cycle (HTRC) with two-stage pumping is presented and investigated. In this cycle, two different pressures and mass flow rates in the HTRC result in two advantages. First, the possibility of direct recovery from the engine block by working fluid of water, which is a low quality waste heat source, is created in a HTRC. Secondly, by doing this, the mean effective temperature of heat addition increases, and hence the efficiency of the Rankin cycle also improves.
The proposed cycle was examined with the thermodynamic model. The results showed that in a HTRC with a two-stage pumping with an increase of 8% in the mean effective temperature of heat addition, the cycle efficiency is slightly improved. Although the operational work obtained from the waste heat recovery from the engine cooling system was insignificant, the effect of the innovation on the recovery from the exhaust was significant. The innovation seems not economical for this low produced energy. However, it should be said that although the effect of the innovation on the increase of the recovery cycle efficiency is low, the changes that must be implemented in the system are also low. 

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Changing the compression ratio and presence of turbocharger are two important issues, affecting on performance, and exhaust emissions in internal combustion engines. To study the functional properties and exhaust emissions in regards to compression ratio at different speeds, the numerical solution of the governing equations on the fluid flow inside the combustion chamber and the numerical solution of one-dimensional computational fluid dynamics with the GT-Power software carried out. The diesel engine was with a displacement of 6.4 Lit and Turbocharged six-cylinder. In this engine was chosen, the compression ratio between 15: 1 and 19: 1 with intervals of one unit and the range of engine speed was from 800 to 2400 rpm. The results showed that by the presence of a turbocharger and changing the compression ratio from 17: 1 to 19: 1, the braking power and torque increased by about 56.24% compared to the non-turbocharged engine. In addition, was reduced the brake specific fuel consumption due to higher power output. The amount of CO and HC emissions decreases based on the reduction of the compression ratio compared to the based case, and the NOX value increases due to the production of higher heat than turbocharged engines. The overall results showed that the turbocharged engine with a 19: 1 compression ratio has the best performance and pollution characteristics.

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According to the global air pollution Crisis, it seems necessary to finding a way for cars pollutions. The Combination of alcoholic fuels with gasoline is one of the methods to reduce pollutions. For optimizing engine performance, fuel availability, toxicity and political advantage, a blend of ethanol, methanol and gasoline is likely to be preferable to using any of these individual substances alone. So the purpose of this paper is studying methanol, ethanol and gasoline blend effect on engine emissions at different engine speed. The simulated model was validated in different RPMs of gasoline engine at full load condition. The effect of combined fuel injection in the simulated model was investigated and compared with the experimental results. The results of simulation have good agreement with experiments. The results show that by ethanol and methanol with gasoline blend CO and HC emissions are lower than gasoline mode, but the NOx and CO2 pollutants increases.