The light-duty vehicle fleet is expected to undergo substantial technological changes over the next several decades. New powertrain designs, alternative fuels, advanced materials and significant changes to the vehicle body are being driven by increasingly stringent fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards. By the end of the next decade, cars and light-duty trucks will be more fuel efficient, weigh less, emit less air pollutants, have more safety features, and will be more expensive to purchase relative to current vehicles. Though the gasoline-powered spark ignition engine will continue to be the dominant powertrain configuration even through 2030, such vehicles will be equipped with advanced technologies, materials, electronics and controls, and aerodynamics. And by 2030, the deployment of alternative methods to propel and fuel vehicles and alternative modes of transportation, including autonomous vehicles, will be well underway. What are these new technologies - how will they work, and will some technologies be more effective than others? Written to inform The United States Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards, this new report from the National Research Council is a technical evaluation of costs, benefits, and implementation issues of fuel reduction technologies for next-generation light-duty vehicles. Cost, Effectiveness, and Deployment of Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles estimates the cost, potential efficiency improvements, and barriers to commercial deployment of technologies that might be employed from 2020 to 2030. This report describes these promising technologies and makes recommendations for their inclusion on the list of technologies applicable for the 2017-2025 CAFE standards.

The homogeneous-charge compression-ignition (HCCI) engine is a novel engine technology with the potential to substantially lower emissions from automotive sources. HCCI engines use lean-premixed combustion to achieve good fuel economy and low emissions of nitrogen-oxides and particulate matter. However, experimentally these engines have demonstrated a viable operating range that is too narrow for vehicular applications. Incomplete combustion or misfire can occur under fuel-lean conditions imposing a minimum load at which the engine can operate. At high loads, HCCI engines are often extremely loud and measured cylinder pressures show strong acoustic oscillations resembling those for a knocking sparkignited engine. The goal of this research was to understand the factors limiting the HCCI range of operability and propose ways of broadening that range. An engine simulation tool was developed to model the combustion process in the engine and predict HCCI knock and incomplete combustion. Predicting HCCI engine knock is particularly important because knock limits the maximum engine torque, and this limitation is a major obstacle to commercialization. A fundamentally-based criterion was developed and shown to give good predictions of the experimental knock limit. Our engine simulation tool was then used to explore the effect of various engine design parameters and operating conditions on the HCCI viable operating range. Performance maps, which show the response of the engine during a normal driving cycle, were constructed to compare these engine designs. The simulations showed that an acceptably broad operating range can be achieved by using a low compression ratio, low octane fuel, and moderate boost pressure. An explanation of why this choice of parameters gives a broad operating window is discussed. Our prediction of the HCCI knock limit is based on the autoignition theory of knock, which asserts that local overpressures in the engine are caused by extremely rapid chemical energy release. A competing theory asserts that knock is caused by the formation of detonation waves initiated at autoignition centers ('hot-spots') in the engine. No conclusive experimental evidence exists for the detonation theory, but many numerical simulations in the literature show that detonation formation is possible; however, some of the assumptions made in these simulations warrant re-examination. In particular, the effect of curvature on small (quasispherical) hot-spots has often been overlooked. We first examined the well-studied case of gasoline spark-ignited engine knock and observed that the size of the hot-spot needed to initiate a detonation is larger than the end-gas region where knock occurs. Subsequent studies of HCCI engine knock predicted that detonations would not form regardless of the hot-spot size because of the low energy content of fuel-lean mixtures typically used in these engines. Our predictions of the HCCI viable operating range were shown to be quite sensitive to details of the ignition chemistry. Therefore, an attempt was made to build an improved chemistry model for HCCI combustion using automatic mechanism-generation software developed in our research group. Extensions to the software were made to allow chemistry model construction for engine conditions. Model predictions for n-heptane/air combustion were compared to literature data from a jet-stirred reactor and rapid-compression machine. We conclude that automatic mechanism generation gives fair predictions without the tuning of rate parameters or other efforts to improve agreement. However, some tuning of the automatically-generated chemistry models is necessary to give the accurate predictions of HCCI combustion needed for our design calculations.

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI)/controlled auto-ignition (CAI) has emerged as one of the most promising engine technologies with the potential to combine fuel efficiency and improved emissions performance, offering reduced nitrous oxides and particulate matter alongside efficiency comparable with modern diesel engines. Despite the considerable advantages, its operational range is rather limited and controlling the combustion (timing of ignition and rate of energy release) is still an area of on-going research. Commercial applications are, however, close to reality.HCCI and CAI engines for the automotive industry presents the state-of-the-art in research and development on an international basis, as a one-stop reference work. The background to the development of HCCI / CAI engine technology is described. Basic principles, the technologies and their potential applications, strengths and weaknesses, as well as likely future trends and sources of further information are reviewed in the areas of gasoline HCCI / CAI engines; diesel HCCI engines; HCCI / CAI engines with alternative fuels; and advanced modelling and experimental techniques. The book provides an invaluable source of information for scientific researchers, R&D engineers and managers in the automotive engineering industry worldwide. - Presents the state-of-the-art in research and development on an international basis - An invaluable source of information for scientific researchers, R&D engineers and managers in the automotive engineering industry worldwide - Looks at one of the most promising engine technologies around

There has been an enormous global research effort to alleviate the current and projected environmental consequences incurred by internal combustion (IC) engines, the dominant propulsion systems in ground vehicles. Two technologies have the potential to improve the efficiency and emissions of IC engines in the near future: variable valve actuation (VVA) and homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI). IC engines equipped with VVA systems are proven to show better performance by adjusting the valve lift and timing appropriately. An electro-hydraulic valve system (EHVS) is a type of VVA system that possesses full flexibility, i.e., the ability to change the valve lift and timing independently and continuously, making it an ideal rapid prototyping tool in a research environment. Unfortunately, an EHVS typically shows a significant response time delay that limits the achievable closed-loop bandwidth and, as a result, shows poor tracking performance. In this thesis, a control framework that includes system identification, feedback control design, and repetitive control design is presented. The combined control law shows excellent performance with a root-mean-square tracking error below 40 [Mu]m over a maximum valve lift of 4 mm. A stability analysis is also provided to show that the mean tracking error converges to zero asymptotically with the combined control law. HCCI, the other technology presented in this thesis, is a combustion strategy initiated by compressing a homogeneous air-fuel mixture to auto-ignition, therefore, ignition occurs at multiple points inside the cylinder without noticeable flame propagation. The result is rapid combustion with low peak in-cylinder temperature, which gives HCCI improved efficiency and reduces NOx formation. To initiate HCCI with a typical compression ratio, the sensible energy of the mixture needs to be high compared to a spark ignited (SI) strategy. One approach to achieve this, called recompression HCCI, is by closing the exhaust valve early to trap a portion of the exhaust gas in the cylinder. Unlike a SI or Diesel strategy, HCCI lacks an explicit combustion trigger, as autoignition is governed by chemical kinetics. Therefore, the thermo-chemical conditions of the air-fuel mixture need to be carefully controlled for HCCI to occur at the desired timing. Compounding this challenge in recompression HCCI is the re-utilization of the exhaust gas which creates cycle-to-cycle coupling. Furthermore, the coupling characteristics can change drastically around different operating points, making combustion timing control difficult across a wide range of conditions. In this thesis, a graphical analysis examines the in-cylinder temperature dynamics of recompression HCCI and reveals three qualitative types of temperature dynamics. With this insight, a switching linear model is formulated by combining three linear models: one for each of the three types of temperature dynamics. A switching controller that is composed of three local linear feedback controllers can then be designed based on the switching model. This switching model/control formulation is tested on an experimental HCCI testbed and shows good performance in controlling the combustion timing across a wide range. A semi-definite program is formulated to find a Lyapunov function for the switching model/control framework and shows that it is stable. As HCCI is dictated by the in-cylinder thermo-chemical conditions, there are further concerns about the robustness of HCCI, i.e., the boundedness of the thermo-chemical conditions with uncertainty existing in the ambient conditions and in the engine's own characteristics due to aging. To assess HCCI's robustness, this thesis presents a linear parameter varying (LPV) model that captures the dynamics of recompression HCCI and possesses an elegant model structure that is more amenable to analysis. Based on this model, a recursive algorithm using convex optimization is formulated to generate analytical statements about the boundedness of the in-cylinder thermo-chemical conditions. The bounds generated by the algorithm are also shown to relate well to the data from the experimental testbed.