Assessment on the performance of an innovative turbocharged gasoline engine: PHOENICE Project

Global warming and air pollution are the challenges that the automotive industry has to face to guarantee a fast transition towards sustainable mobility. In order to achieve this goal, the best strategy is to follow different paths, from powertrain electrification to innovative high efficiency ICEs. In this framework, the PHOENICE project aims to demonstrate that ICEs can still play an important role for the decarbonization of on-road mobility. To minimize fuel consumption and pollutant emissions, a set of novel technologies has been adopted to maximize the efficiency of the ICE and to fully exploit the synergies with a PHEV hybrid system. In particular, this project aims to obtain an ICE peak indicated thermal efficiency of 47% using innovative technologies such as e-turbo and dual dilution combustion (using both lean mixture and cooled EGR) and be compliant with upcoming EURO 7 regulations by means of an exhaust line fit for a lean combustion exhaust gases. This thesis shows a comparison between the baseline state-of-the-art turbocharged gasoline engine and its modified version of PHOENICE Project. In this work a Virtual Test rig was modeled using GT-Suite in order to evaluate the improvements of the new solutions implemented in the engine in terms of BSFC and pollutant emissions. Afterwards, experimental tests at steady state were performed in order to optimize the engine calibration data at the Politecnico di Torino dynamic engine test bench. The results obtained on the Brake Thermal Efficiency (BTE) in the operative key-point 3000 x 13 show an efficiency increase of 5.5%, with a BTE of 40.3% with the Dual dilution approach and a reduction of 70% on NOx emissions. In the medium load key-point 2000 x 5.5 the BTE gain is 4%, with a BTE of 37.5% in the PHOENICE setup, leading to a NOx reduction of 60%.