Exhaust Heat Utilisation and Losses in Internal Combustion Engines with Focus on the Gas Exchange System

Abstract: Exhaust gas energy recovery should be considered in improving fuel economy of internal combustion engines. A large portion of fuel energy is wasted through the exhaust of internal combustion engines. Turbocharger and turbocompound can, however, recover part of this wasted heat. The energy recovery depends on the efficiency and mass flow of the turbine(s) as well as the exhaust gas state and properties such as pressure, temperature and specific heat capacity. The exhaust gas pressure is the principal parameter which is required for the turbine energy recovery, but higher exhaust back-pressures on the engines create higher pumping losses. This is in addition to the heat losses in the turbochargers what makes any measurement and simulation of the engines more complex.This thesis consists of two major parts. First of all, the importance of heat losses in turbochargers has been shown theoretically and experimentally with the aim of including heat transfer of the turbochargers in engine simulations. Secondly, different concepts have been examined to extract exhaust heat energy including turbocompounding and divided exhaust period (DEP) with the aim of improved exhaust heat utilisation and reduced pumping losses.In the study of heat transfer in turbochargers, the turbocharged engine simulation was improved by including heat transfer of the turbocharger in the simulation. Next, the heat transfer modelling of the turbochargers was improved by introducing a new method for convection heat transfer calculation with the support of on-engine turbocharger measurements under different heat transfer conditions. Then, two different turbocharger performance maps were assessed concerning the heat transfer conditions in the engine simulation. Finally, the temperatures of turbocharger’s surfaces were predicted according to the measurements under different heat transfer conditions and their effects are studied on the turbocharger performance. The present study shows that the heat transfer in the turbochargers is very crucial to take into account in the engine simulations, especially in transient operations.In the study of exhaust heat utilisation, important parameters concerning turbine and gas exchange system that can influence the waste heat recovery were discussed. In addition to exhaust back-pressure, turbine speed and turbine efficiency, the role of the air-fuel equivalence ratio was demonstrated in details, because lower air-fuel equivalence ratio in a Diesel engine can provide higher exhaust gas temperature. The results of this study indicate that turbocompound engine efficiency is relatively insensitive to the air-fuel equivalence ratio.To decrease the influence of the increased exhaust back-pressure of a turbocompound engine, a new architecture was developed by combining the turbocompound engine with DEP. The aim of this study was to utilise the earlier phase (blowdown) of the exhaust stroke in the turbine(s) and let the later phase (scavenging) of the exhaust stroke bypass the turbine(s). To decouple the blowdown phase from the scavenging phase, the exhaust flow was divided between two different exhaust manifolds with different valve timing.According to this study, this combination improves the fuel consumption in low engine speeds and deteriorates it at high engine speeds. This is mainly due to long duration of choked flow in the exhaust valves because this approach is using only one of the two exhaust valves on each cylinder at a time.Therefore, the effects of enlarged effective flow areas of the exhaust valves were studied. Two methods were used to enlarge the effective flow area i.e. increasing the diameters of the blowdown and scavenging valves by 4 mm; and modifying the valve lift curves of the exhaust valves to fast opening and closing. Both methods improved BSFC in the same order even though they were different in nature. Fast opening and closing of the exhaust valves required shorter blowdown duration and longer scavenging duration. The modified lift curves provided less pumping losses, less available energy into the turbine and larger amplitude of the pulsating flow through the turbine.In order for defining a set of important parameters that should be examined in experimental studies, a sensitivity analysis was performed on the turbocompound DEP engine in terms of break specific fuel consumption to different parameters concerning the gas exchange such as blowdown valve timing, scavenging valve timing, blowdown valve size, scavenging valve size, discharge coefficients of blowdown and scavenging ports, turbine efficiency, turbine size and power transmission efficiency.Finally, to overcome the restriction in the effective flow areas of the exhaust valves, DEP was implemented externally on the exhaust manifold instead of engine exhaust valves, which is called externally DEP (ExDEP). This innovative engine architecture, which benefits from supercharging, turbocharging and turbocompounding, has a great fuel-saving potential in almost all load points up to 4%.