Effects of misfire on the dynamic behavior of gasoline Engine Crankshafts

•The crankshaft is mainly excited by acyclism in the case of a faultless engine.•Misfire faults increase the vibration level on the crankshaft.•Misfire faults caused an apparition of sidebands around the acyclism frequency.•An amplitude modulation is observed when the ignition corresponds to defect. Misfire faults caused by the malfunction of single cylinder increases the emission level and fuel consumption of internal combustion. So, the detection of misfire is required. In this paper, we studied the effect of misfire on the dynamic response of the crankshaft in order to propose a method based on the torsional vibration signal of crankshaft acceleration for misfire detection. For this, a torsional model of a four cylinder crankshaft excited by the acyclism phenomena is proposed. The external forces are the inertia and gas torque of each engine cylinder. The equations of motion are obtained by using Lagrange method and computed with the help of Newmark algorithm. Three kind of misfire faults of the first cylinder are modeled through the gas pressure variation inside this cylinder and induced in the excitation torques: missing combustion, pre-ignition and delayed ignition. After that, the vibration responses of the crankshaft is computed and processed in order to highlight the effect of misfire defects on the crankshaft vibration signals. In fact, appearance of sidebands around the acyclism frequency in the frequency domain allow detecting the misfire and the time acceleration signal allows identifying the kind of defect.