Heat transfer has a profound influence on homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion. When a thermal barrier coating is applied to the combustion chamber, the insulating effect magnifies the wall temperature swing, decreasing heat transfer during combustion. This enables improvements in both thermal and combustion efficiency without the detrimental impacts of intake charge heating. Increasing the temperature swing requires coatings with lower thermal conductivity and heat capacity. A promising avenue for simultaneously decreasing both thermal conductivity and capacity is to increase the porosity fraction. A proprietary solution precursor plasma spray process enables discrete organization of the porosity structure, called inter-pass boundaries, which in turn produces a step-reduction in thermal conductivity for a given porosity level. In this investigation, yttria-stabilized zirconia is used to create four different thermal barrier coatings to study the potential of structured porosity as means of improving the “temperature swing” behavior in a homogeneous charge compression ignition engine. The baseline coating is “dense YSZ,” applied using a standard air-plasma spray process. Next, significant reductions of the thermal conductivity are achieved by utilizing the solution precursor plasma spray process to create inter-pass boundaries with a moderate overall porosity. Performance, efficiency, and emissions are compared against both a baseline configuration with a metal piston and an air-plasma spray “dense YSZ” coating. Experiments are carried out in a single-cylinder gasoline homogeneous charge compression ignition engine with exhaust re-induction. Experiments indicate that incorporating structured porosity into thermal barrier coatings produces tangible gains in combustion and thermal efficiencies. However, there is an upper limit to porosity levels acceptable for homogeneous charge compression ignition engine application because an elevated porosity fraction leads to excessive surface roughness and undesirable fuel interactions. Comparison of the coatings showed the best results with coating thickness of up to 150 µm. Thicker coatings led to slower surface temperature response and attenuated swing temperature magnitude.
Basic engine thermodynamics predicts that spark ignited engine efficiency is a function of both the compression ratio of the engine and the specific heat ratio of the working fluid. In practice the compression ratio of the engine is often limited due to knock. Both higher specific heat ratio and higher compression ratio lead to higher end gas temperatures and increase the likelihood of knock. In actual engine cycles, heat transfer losses increase at higher compression ratios and limit efficiency even when the knock limit is not reached. In this paper we investigate the role of both the compression ratio and the specific heat ratio on engine efficiency by conducting experiments comparing operation of a single-cylinder variable-compression-ratio engine with both hydrogen-air and hydrogen-oxygen-argon mixtures. For low load operation it is found that the hydrogen-oxygen-argon mixtures result in higher indicated thermal efficiencies.Peak efficiency for the hydrogen-oxygen-argon mixtures is found at compression ratio 5.5 whereas for the hydrogen-air mixture with an equivalence ratio of 0.24 the peak efficiency is found at compression ratio 13. We apply a three-zone model to help explain the effects of specific heat ratio and compression ratio on efficiency. Operation with hydrogen-oxygen-argon mixtures at low loads is more efficient because the lower compression ratio results in a substantially larger portion of the gas to reside in the adiabatic core rather than in the boundary layer and in the crevices, leading to less heat transfer and more complete combustion.
Abstract-The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is widely used in the process industry, but to various degrees of effectiveness because it is sometimes poorly tuned. The goal of this work is to present a method using extremum seeking (ES) to tune the PID parameters such that optimal performance is achieved. ES is a non-model based method which searches on-line for the parameters which minimize a cost function; in this case the cost function is representative of the controllers performance. Furthermore, this method has the advantage that it can be applied to plants in which there is no knowledge of the model. We demonstrate the ES tuning method on a cross section of plants typical of those found in industrial applications. The PID parameters are tuned based on the results of step response simulations to produce a response with minimal settling time and overshoot. Additionally, we have compared these results to those found using other tuning methods widely used in industry.
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