Improvement of the Dynamic Characteristic of an Automotive Engine by a Turbocharger Assisted by an Electric Motor

Turbocharging and subsequent charge cooling of the working medium usually causes increase of the mean effective pressure in an automotive diesel engine. Poor performance during the engine load increase is attributed to the nature of energy exchange between the engine and the turbocharger. Filling of the intake and exhaust manifolds, as well as consequent increase of the pressure and acceleration of the rotating components of the turbocharger require a certain period of time. Dynamic performance of the turbocharger can be substantially improved by means of an electric motor attached directly to the turbo shaft. A new concept of asynchronous electric motor with a very thin rotor was applied to support the turbocharger during the transient operation of the engine. The experimental work of matching an electrically assisted turbocharger to an engine is rather expensive; it was therefore decided to determine general characteristic of the electric motor separately through experiments, whereas transient response of the turbocharged and intercooled diesel engine was simulated by a zero-dimensional filling and emptying computer simulation method. A lot of experimentally obtained data and empirical formulae for the compressor, gas turbine, flow coefficients of the engine valves, intercooler, high-pressure fuel pump with the pneumatic control device (LDA), combustion parameters, etc., were applied to overcome deficiency introduced by the zero-dimensional simulation model. As the result a reliable and accurate program compatible with the experimental results in steady and transient engine operation was developed and is presented in the work. Faster transient response, i.e., better load acceptance of the engine was obtained by applying an adequate electric motor to assist the turbocharger; three versions of electric motors with different torque to mass moment of inertia ratios and different operating regimes were introduced in the simulation program to investigate their influence on the transient behavior of the engine.