Turbulent jet ignition is a combustion technology that can offer higher thermal efficiency compared to the homogeneous spark ignition engines. A potential combustion-related challenge with turbulent jet ignition is the pre-chamber misfiring due to improperly scavenged combustion residuals and maintaining the mixture composition there. Dual-mode turbulent jet ignition is a novel combustion technology developed to address the aforementioned issues. The dual-mode turbulent jet ignition is an engine combustion technology wherein an auxiliary air supply apart from an auxiliary fuel injection is provided into the pre-chamber. This technology can offer enhanced stoichiometry control and combustion stability in the pre-chamber and subsequently combustion control in the main chamber. In this work, engine testing of a single-cylinder dual-mode turbulent jet ignition engine having a compression ratio of 12.0 was completed with liquid gasoline and the indicated thermal efficiency was measured. High-speed pressure recordings were used to compare and analyze different operating conditions. Coefficient of variation in the indicated mean effective pressure and the global air/fuel equivalence ratio values were used to characterize the engine operation. Lean operating conditions for a global air/fuel equivalence ratio of 1.85 showed an indicated efficiency of 46.8% ± 0.5% at 1500 r/min and 6.0 bar indicated mean effective pressure. In addition, the combustion stability of this engine was tested with nitrogen dilution. The nitrogen diluent fraction was controlled by monitoring the intake oxygen fraction. The dual-mode turbulent jet ignition engine of compression ratio 12.0 delivered an indicated efficiency of 46.6% ± 0.5% under near-stoichiometric operation at 1500 r/min and 7.7 bar indicated mean effective pressure with a coefficient of variation in indicated mean effective pressure of less than 2% for all conditions tested.

Turbulent jet ignition combustion is a promising concept for achieving high thermal efficiency and low NO x (nitrogen oxides) emissions. A control-oriented turbulent jet ignition combustion model with satisfactory accuracy and low computational effort is usually a necessity for optimizing the turbulent jet ignition combustion system and developing the associated model-based turbulent jet ignition control strategies. This article presents a control-oriented turbulent jet ignition combustion model developed for a rapid compression machine configured for turbulent jet ignition combustion. A one-zone gas exchange model is developed to simulate the gas exchange process in both pre-and main-combustion chambers. The combustion process is modeled by a two-zone combustion model, where the ratio of the burned and unburned gases flowing between the two combustion chambers is variable. To simulate the influence of the turbulent jets on the rate of combustion in the main-combustion chamber, a new parameter-varying Wiebe function is proposed and used for the mass fraction burned calculation in the main-combustion chamber. The developed model is calibrated using the least-squares fitting and optimization procedures. Experimental data sets with different air-to-fuel ratios in both combustion chambers and different pre-combustion chamber orifice areas are used to calibrate and validate the model. The simulation results show good agreement with the experimental data for all the experimental data sets. This indicates that the developed combustion model is accurate for developing and validating turbulent jet ignition combustion control strategies. Future work will extend the rapid compression machine combustion model to engine applications.

We present a terrain traversability mapping and navigation system (TNS) for autonomous excavator applications in an unstructured environment. We use an efficient approach to extract terrain features from RGB images and 3D point clouds and incorporate them into a global map for planning and navigation. Our system can adapt to changing environments and update the terrain information in real-time. Moreover, we present a novel dataset, the Complex Worksite Terrain (CWT) dataset, which consists of RGB images from construction sites with seven categories based on navigability. Our novel algorithms improve the mapping accuracy over previous SOTA methods by 4.17 − 30.48% and reduce MSE on the traversability map by 13.8 − 71.4%. We have combined our mapping approach with planning and control modules in an autonomous excavator navigation system and observe 49.3% improvement in the overall success rate. Based on TNS, we demonstrate the first autonomous excavator that can navigate through unstructured environments consisting of deep pits, steep hills, rock piles, and other complex terrain features. Dataset, videos, and a full technical report are available at gamma.umd.edu/tns/.

A control-oriented engine model is necessary for developing and validating the associated engine control strategies. For engines equipped with the turbulent jet ignition system, the interaction between the pre-and main-combustion chambers should be considered in the control-oriented model for model-based control strategies that optimize the overall thermal efficiency in real-time. Therefore, a two-zone combustion model based on the newly proposed parametervarying Wiebe function is proposed. Since the engine uses the liquid fuel, a pre-chamber air-fuel mixing and vaporization model are also developed. The model was validated using the experimental data from a single-cylinder turbulent jet ignition engine under different operational conditions, and the simulation results show a good agreement with the experimental data. The relative simulation error of the in-cylinder pressure is less than 8%. For most of the other pressure-related variables, such as indicated mean effective pressure and main-chamber burn duration, the relative errors are within 5%.

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