Resumen de Modelling of heat losses through coated cylinder walls and their impact on engine performance
Johan Enrique Escalona Cornejo
Currently, vehicles powered by internal combustion engines (ICE) are targeted as contributing largely to environmental pollution. In this regard, there has been significant international cooperation to enact laws that regulate the polluting emissions. Hence, the car manufacturers have oriented efforts to the development of cleaner and more eco-friendly technologies. In order to face this situation, electrified vehicles have emerged as one of the most promising projects in the automotive industry for the coming years. However, this target still seems far on the horizon. In this sense, hybridization with thermal and electric engines seems to be the path to follow in the short term. Consequently, ICEs will continue to be one of the important sources of terrestrial propulsion in the coming years. To mitigate the inherent polluting effects of internal combustion engines, different technologies have been proposed to develop more efficient engines. Among them, the application of thermal coatings on the combustion chamber walls. This technology aims at reducing the heat losses in the engine, and thus increase its thermal efficiency. The main objective of this thesis is to study the impact of coating the combustion chamber walls of an engine on heat losses and thermal efficiency. The experimental definition of the heat fluxes through the walls is complex and not very reliable because it requires the measurement of wall temperatures. For this reason, CFD-CHT (Computational fluid dynamics-Conjugate Heat Transfer) is used. The first step was to validate the computational tool employed for CFD-CHT calculations in internal combustion engines. For this, a preliminary study in simple geometries such as a circular pipe or a rectangular channel was performed. Heat transfer models were evaluated and the relevance of certain parameters such as roughness was determined. To reinforce the study, a thermal analysis in a more realistic geometry such as the piston of a CI engine was carried out. The temperature values calculated by the software were almost the same as the experimental measurements. Consequently, the reliability of the computational tool was verified. Next, a methodology was proposed to address the problem of modeling very thin layers of thermal coating for three-dimensional CFD-CHT calculations. The methodology consists in defining an "equivalent material" with a thickness and number of nodes that allow a computationally realistic mesh. For this, a DoE in combination with a multiple regression analysis was employed. The first CFD-CHT simulations in ICEs were carried out for a gasoline engine. The study was performed for two configurations: metallic engine and engine with coated piston and cylinder head. An exhaustive heat transfer analysis was made in order to determine the impact of applying the thermal coating on the engine. Comparison with experimental data proved the suitability of the CHT calculations to evaluate heat losses in ICEs. However, no improvement on engine efficiency was observed in the gasoline engine due to the type of coating applied on the combustion chamber walls. Experience with the gasoline engine calculations showed that CHT calculations were very time consuming. In this regard, some strategies aimed at optimizing the calculations were analyzed in order to reduce calculation times. The most successful methodology was based on AMR cell refinement to optimize the mesh and reduce significantly the computational costs. This approach was used to study the impact of applying a new generation thermal coating on the piston top of a Diesel engine. The results obtained indicated that this type of coating allows for some improvement in the thermal efficiency of the engine without affecting its performance.
