Three Pressure Analysis automatic calibration methodology

The increasingly stricter laws on the pollutant emissions are forcing all the main automotive companies to review their own business strategy and develop new technologies aimed at fuel consumptions reduction and emission abatement.In modern OEM’s, the technological development must follow the time constraints imposed by the market, therefore the planning and release of new technologies must happen in such a rapid and prompt way.This need has given rise to new tools which allow to minimize the development times.In this scenario, the fluid dynamic numerical simulation plays a key role. Over the last years, in fact, the fluid dynamic simulation has completely revolutionized internal combustion engines development: it allows to execute performance analysis, as well as predict fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions. In the past, the validity of an automotive technological solution could be confirmed or refuted only by realizing the prototype and performing a large number of experimental tests, with a consequent significant cost and time-consuming process.The fluid dynamic simulation supports the always indispensable experimental activity and allows to reduce significantly the number of tests which is required to validate any automotive technology.Thanks to fluid dynamic computational codes, it’s possible to evaluate the performances of a new technological solution already before the physical implementation; by doing in this way the prototype will then be built only if analysis provided successful results.It’s important to highlight that fluid dynamic simulation doesn’t only allow to speed up the engines development times, but also allows to evaluate thermodynamic quantities which are not experimentally measurable.Focuses of study of my thesis work are the development of a calibration methodology for Three Pressure Analysis in Spark Ignition Engines, and automatization of the same process.TPA is an analysis which is performed in the one-dimensional computational code GT-Power and it’s a fundamental step for predictive combustion model SI-Turb calibration, in fact it’s executed to assess gas exchange and trapped conditions (Trapping ratio and Residual fraction) that will be later used to calibrate SI-Turb through a “Measured+Predicted” analysis in a closed volume engine model. Develop a robust TPA calibration methodology, therefore, allows indirectly to make a more accurate initialization of the closed volume engine model, and as the effective calibration of SI-Turb 4 characteristic parameters will be then carried out just in the closed volume model, this means achieving a more accurate predictive combustion model SI-Turb calibration.The automatization of the whole process has been achieved thanks to the co-simulation of several software’s, such as GT-Power, Matlab and Windows Command Prompt.The whole project has been carried out in Toyota Motor Europe (TME) in Bruxelles, where I had the chance to join Model Based Design Team for one-year internship.