Further experimental investigation of motored engine friction using shunt pipe method

Mechanical friction is a significant power dissipater in the internal combustion engine. In the effort of designing more efficient and less pollutant engines, friction reduction is certainly on the agenda to be investigated. Such investigation cannot be possible without an accurate measurement of the same quantity. This publication regards a continued study on the mechanical friction determination in an internal combustion engine using the Pressurised Motoring Method. In this work, the friction mean effective pressure of a four-cylinder compression ignition engine was investigated with varying engine speed and manifold pressurisation, using a dedicated high precision sensor for the correct determination of the cylinder Top Dead Centre position. Two different measurement sessions were carried out; in the first, air was employed as pressurisation medium, testing 32 different setpoints; in the second, instead, with the aim to test the effect of the variation of thermochemical properties of fluids on the thermodynamic loss angle, Argon was used in place of air in 18 different setpoints. In the motored condition it is widely accepted that the brake torque is a measure of the losses of the engine and therefore has to be supplied by the driver, in our case the AC motor. The 2000 rpm region was explored with the aim to investigate the high motoring brake torque observed in a previous work from the same authors [1]. An investigation of the volumetric efficiency effect on motoring brake torque is also presented in the paper. Values of IMEP, BMEP, FMEP, peak in-cylinder pressure, loss angle and other parameters are given. The loss angle measured at each setpoint using the TDC sensor is compared with the loss angle evaluated by the use of two thermodynamic methods developed by Stas' [2] and Pipitone [3].