Automotive Science and Engineering
Volume:10 Issue: 4, Autumn 2020

This work investigates the effects of hydrogen addition to compressed natural gas (CNG) on combustion characteristics and emission reduction using a closed cycle simulation with exact geometry of piston and cylinder head. The effect of equivalence ratio on combustion characteristic were investigated using a spark ignition (SI) engine fueled with CNG and addition of 10% vol, 15% vol and 20%vol hydrogen. Two different speed of 1500 and 3000 rpm have considered at full load condition. The modeling includes ECFM combustion model combined with K-ζ-f turbulent modeland has been done by AVL Fire software. Different volume fraction of Hydrogen with different excess air modeled and validated with experimental data. The validation procedure included in-cylinder pressure profile, maximum pressure, angle of maximum pressure, indicated mean effective pressure, and carbon monoxide (CO) emission showing a good agreement with the experimental results. The value of the peak pressure increases by hydrogen addition and it takes place sooner as the hydrogen volume fraction increases. However, the mean effective pressure drops 3.5%, 7% and 15% for HCNG 10, HCNG15 and HCNG20, respectively. CO emission decreases by increasing the hydrogen volume fraction. The results also indicate that hydrogen addition in lean combustion causes more CO reduction compared to the fuel-rich mixtures.

Drying temperature of the flux at normal atmosphere has a crucial role in brazing quality in automotive aluminum-based heat exchangers. Over the course of this research, NOCOLOK® flux consists of two phases of K2AlF5.H2O and KAlF4 with melting point around 580 °C was used. A flux slurry was applied on the base metal, and dried at 220, 300 and 380 °C in air. Mechanical assessment revealed that when flux dried at 300 °C, the joint withstands maximum shear stress of 44 MPa with complete bonding. At 220 °C and 380 °C, joint shear stresses are 34 MPa, 30 MPa respectively. 380 °C dry-off temperature under nitrogen gas improved shear strength to 39 MPa. Taking dry-off temperature as 300 °C the amount of defective heat exchangers was reduced from 6% to 2% on a daily basis.

Due to very low PM and NOx emissions and considerable engine efficiency, dual-fuel combustion mode such as RCCI strategy attracted lots of attention compared to other combustion modes. In this numerical research work, the impacts of direct injection timing and pressure of diesel fuel on performance and level of engine-out emissions in a diesel-butanol RCCI engine was investigated. To simulate the combustion process, a reduced chemical kinetic mechanism, which consists of 349 reactions 76 species was used. The influence of thirty-six various strategies based on two diesel spraying characteristics such as injection pressure (650, 800, 1000, and 1200 bar) and diesel spray timing (300 to 340 CA with 5 CA steps) have been examined. Results indicated that, under the specific operating conditions like 1000-bar spray pressure by direct injection at 45 CA BTDC and the spray angle of 145 degrees, the level of cylinder-out pollutants such as CO (up to 26%), NOx (about 86%), PM (by nearly 71%) and HC (about 17.25%) have been simultaneously reduced. Also, ISFC decreased by about 2.3%, IP increased by about 2.4%, and also ITE improved by nearly 2% compared to the baseline engine operating conditions.

In this paper, the exhaust emissions of a diesel engine operating with different nanoparticles additives in diesel-biodiesel blended fuels were investigated. Firstly multi wall carbon nano tubes (CNT) with concentrations of 40, 80 and 120 ppm and nano silver particles of 40, 80 and 120 ppm with nano-structure were produced and then added as additives to the diesel-biodiesel blended fuels. A four-stroke six cylinders diesel engine was fuelled with the new fuels and operated at different engine speeds. The experimental results showed that CO2 emission increased by 17% with an increase in nanoparticles concentrations at diesel-biodiesel blended fuel. Also, CO emission with nanoparticles added to biodiesel-diesel fuel was 25.17% lower than neat diesel fuel. The results showed a decrease up to 28.56% in UHC emission using the silver nano-diesel-biodiesel blended fuel. NOx emission increased with adding nanoparticles to the blended fuels compared to the neat diesel fuel. The experimental results demonstrated that silver & CNT nanoparticles can effectively be used as additive in diesel-biodiesel blended fuel in order to enhance complete combustion of the air-fuel mixture and reduce the exhaust emissions. Consequently the nano biodiesel can be considered as an alternative and environment friendly fuel for CI engine.

The primary objective of a brake disc is to absorb frictional heat during braking and dissipated it immediately by convection and radiation. However, during hard and repetitive brakings, thermal coning on brake disc generates surface hot spots which are responsible for the undesired accumulation of compressive stresses on the surface of the brake disc. These stresses would lead to disc cracking and finally failure of it. In the current paper, a coupled transient thermo-mechanical FE analysis of a heavy vehicle braking system is carried out in a way that thermal coning of the disc and surface hot spots and bands are recognizable. Braking condition is chosen from a standard for hard braking in trucks. Moreover, five additional braking actions with different severities are investigated to study the effects of braking severity on thermo-mechanical instability of brake discs. Comparison of numerical results of transient temperature during braking and cooling phases with experiment reveal a high accuracy of thermal prediction of this model. Also, the results show that thermal coning of brake disc is varied between 0.05 to 0.7 mm depending on braking severity and tangential location of the disc. Additionally, surface hot spots experience higher temperature gradients in higher decelerations. Finally, results show that circumferential compressive stresses during braking are the major component of thermal stresses and should be taken into account for life estimation analysis.

A new safe optimal consensus procedure is presented to guarantee the asymptotic and string stability as well as crash avoidance of large-scale non-identical traffic flow. Since time delay is an inherent characteristic of physical actuators and sensors, measurement delay and lags are involved in the upper level control structure. A third-order linear model is employed to define the 1-D motion of each automated vehicle (AV) and the constant time headway plan is employed to regulate the inter-AV distance. It is assumed that the network structure is decentralized look ahead (DLA) and each AV has access to relative position and velocity regarding with the front AV. A linear control law is introduced for each AV and by performing the stability analysis in frequency domain, the necessary conditions guaranteeing string stability and crash avoidance for large-scale traffic flow are derived. Afterwards, to calculate the optimal control parameters guaranteeing the best performance, an objective function combining all mentioned conditions as well as maximum overshoot, settling time and stability margin is introduced. The genetic algorithm (GA) technique is employed to optimize the presented objective function and obtain the optimal control parameters. Various numerical results are proposed to demonstrate the efficiency of this method.

Braking test is one of the most important tests of a mechanized technical inspection line. In this study, the effect of tire pressure changes on the accuracy of the braking test results is investigated at technical inspection centers. This study is conducted in three stages. In the first step, the braking efficiency at different tire pressures is examined using a roller brake tester. In the second step, the tests at different pressures and velocities on the road are done. These tests are carried out in terms of stopping distance, to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the first step test results. The results of the first and second steps showed that the effect of tire pressure changes on the braking efficiency is significant. In the third step, the braking test results of a thousand vehicles that received technical inspection certificate are studied. Analysis of these results, considering the results of the first and second steps cleared that about 16% of vehicles that received technical inspection certificate have lower braking efficiency than the minimum acceptable efficiency. The obtained results specified the necessity of adjusting the pressure of tires before the braking test at vehicle technical inspection centers in Iran.