Trends and Limits of Two-Stage Boosting Systems for Automotive Diesel Engines

Abstract

Internal combustion engines developments are driven by emissions reduction and energetic efficiency increase. To reach the next standards, downsized/downspeeded engines are required to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. These techniques place an important demand on the charging system and force the introduction of multistage boosting architectures. With many possible arrangements and large number of parameter to optimize, these architectures present higher complexity than current systems. The objective of this thesis has thus been to investigate the potential of two-stage boosting architectures to establish, for the particular case of passenger car downsized/downspeeded Diesel engines, the most efficient solutions for achieving the forthcoming CO2 emissions targets.

To respond to this objective, an exhaustive literature review of all existing solutions has first been performed to determinate the most promising two-stage boosting architectures. Then, a new matching methodology has been defined to optimize the architectures with, on the one hand the development of a new turbine characteristic maps representation allowing straight forward matching calculations and, on the other hand, the development of a complete 0D engine model able to predict, within a reduced computational time, the behavior of any boosting architecture in both steady state and transient operating conditions. Finally, a large parametric study has been carried out to analyze and compare the different architectures on the same base engines, to characterize the impacts of thermo-mechanical limits and turbocharger size on engine performance, and to quantify for different engine development options their potential improvements in term of fuel consumption, maximum power and fun to drive.

As main contributions, the thesis provides new modeling tools for efficient matching calculations and synthesizes the main trends in advanced boosting systems to guide future passenger car Diesel engine develop