Impact of electrically assisted turbocharging on the transient response of an off-highway diesel engine

Abstract

Engine boosting via turbocharging is a method to increase the engine power output with minimal or no increase in engine parasitic, frictional and pumping losses. Turbocharging in conjunction with engine down-sizing and down-speeding allows a reduction of engine fuel consumption, while maintaining a high engine power output. However, turbocharging introduces a lag in engine transient response, caused by the finite amount of time required by the turbocharger to accelerate, which has to be minimized. Electric turbocharger assistance consists of coupling an electric motor/generator to a standard turbocharger. The scope of the motor/generator is to increase the power available to accelerate the rotor assembly, so that the time to boost is reduced. The motor/generator could also be utilized to brake the turbocharger to control boost and avoid over-speeds, thus replacing the conventional waste-gate. Furthermore, electric assistance allows turbocompounding to be implemented. Turbocompounding improves the engine efficiency by utilizing the turbine and motor/generator to recuperate additional exhaust flow energy. In this thesis, the electric turbocharger assistance impact on the turbocharger and engine performance is studied. An electrically assisted turbocharger prototype has been developed by industrial partners and it has been tested by the author of this thesis. The performance of the turbocharger turbine and motor/generator has been characterized over the full speed range and the impact of the electric assistance on the turbine flow has been investigated experimentally. It has not been possible to characterize the turbine up to choking conditions, so the data has been extrapolated via a mean-line model. The performance data obtained has been utilized to generate a model of the assisted turbocharger, which has been coupled to a one-dimensional model of a non-highway 7-litre diesel engine. This model has been utilized to study the impact of electric turbocharger assistance on the engine transient performance. The electrical machine characterization revealed that the switched reluctance motor/generator operates efficiently up to a speed of 135,000 rev/min, making it one of the fastest running switched reluctance machines of this size. The peak machine efficiency is 93% (excluding the turbocharger bearing losses) and the maximum power output measured is 5.3 kW in generating mode and 4.3 kW in motoring mode. The motor/generator rotor aerodynamic drag loss has been calculated via computational fluid dynamics software and has been found to be 63 W at 140,000 rev/min. Via a novel experimental technique, it has been possible to characterize the turbocharger turbine down to an expansion ratio of 1.00. This experiment revealed that the mass flow rate drops to zero at an expansion ratio higher than unity and that below this critical pressure ratio the turbine flow is reversed. The characterization of the turbine during speed transients showed that the operating point on the performance map deviates from the quasi-steady line. This indicates that minor unsteady effects occur in the turbine and exhaust manifold flow. A further experiment revealed that the motor/generator torque oscillations have a negligible impact on the turbine performance. The engine simulations showed that the ideal electric assistance motoring power for this application is in the 5 to 10 kW range. A 5 kW machine reduces the engine speed drop, which occurs when the engine load is suddenly increased, by up to 83%, depending on the initial load and load step size, and reduces the time to recover the original speed by up to 86%. The simulations also revealed that electric assistance is more effective than the turbine variable geometry system in improving the engine transient response, but the variable geometry system is useful to optimize boost for engine specific fuel consumption over different engine loading conditions.