Numerical Analysis of a Small Turbo-Charged Spark-Ignition Engine

The reduction of green-house gas emissions, that is the reduction of engine fuel consumption, is becoming a primary requirement for the automotive industry as well as meeting current and future emission legislations. Performing high torque values with small displacement engines, the so-called “downsizing”, permits, in general, to limit some typical engine losses (for instance: pumping and friction losses), increasing the overall engine efficiency. This means to improve vehicle fuel economy and, as a consequence, the CO₂ emissions avoiding a performance decrease. In this paper, the behavior of a small displacement turbocharged spark-ignition engine prototype, for medium size passenger cars, has been analyzed. 3-D numerical simulations have been carried out in order to achieve a lot of information on engine performance and control parameters. Thus, at different engine operating points, intake and exhaust manifold pressure, volumetric efficiency, high pressure curves, the flow field of the fresh charge within the cylinder, the air to fuel ratio distribution, the residual gas fraction distribution and so long have been calculated. Since, as usual, the turbocharged version of the engine under study derives from an existing naturally aspirated engine, the purpose of this investigation is to obtain a detailed picture of the variations produced by turbo-charging on engine main parameters. The increase of knock risk due to higher cylinder pressures has been evaluated as well. Thanks to the three dimensional analysis, sound information have been obtained, so that suggestions for modifying some geometric engine parameters, according to the variations imposed by turbo-charging, have been proposed. Computations have been performed by means of the 3-D AVL Fire code. Initial and boundary conditions have been evaluated by means of 1-D, unsteady computations running separately from the 3-D code. The model utilized in this study has been validated by comparing the obtained results to the measured data provided by the research center of the engine manufacturer.