A New Tool to Perform Global Energy Balances in DI Diesel Engines

The generalization of exhaust aftertreatment systems along with the growing awareness about climate change is leading to an increasing importance of the efficiency over other criteria during the design of reciprocating engines. Using experimental and theoretical tools to perform detailed global energy balance (GEB) of the engine is a key issue for assessing the potential of different strategies to reduce consumption. With the objective of improving the analysis of GEB, this paper describes a tool that allows calculating the detailed internal repartition of the fuel energy in DI Diesel engines. Starting from the instantaneous in-cylinder pressure, the tool is able to describe the different energy paths thanks to specific submodels for all the relevant subsystems. Hence, the heat transfer from gases to engine walls is obtained with convective and radiative models in the chamber and ports; the repartition of the heat flux throughout the engine metal elements towards the oil and coolant is estimated with a lumped capacitance model; finally, the auxiliary systems and friction losses are obtained through specific semiempirical submodels. The validation of the tool is performed in a 4-cylinder DI Diesel engine instrumented to perform detailed experimental GEB. Finally, a simple analysis of combined internal and external analysis in the complete engine map shows the effect of operating conditions on each energy term. Thus it is demonstrated the utility of the proposed tool, that complements the experimental heat flow measurements in Diesel engine researches oriented to the reduction of energy consumption.