Search Results

The fuel economy benefits of hybrids have been accepted for long. However their drivability has not been found very acceptable. This paper present a holistic approach which resulted in the development of a Gasoline Turbocharged Hybrid vehicle that not only produced the fuel economy benefits associated with hybridization but also provided driving characteristic of a “fun to drive” vehicle. A comparison of the benefits of the developed Turbohybrid Gasoline vehicle over its base vehicle configuration as well as the later day model of the base vehicle shows the improvements that have been possible in both fuel economy as well as the fun to drive aspect.

An experimental study was conducted on a carburetted 2-stroke gasoline, 3-wheeler engine for operating on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) in bi-fuel mode and further to run on dedicated CNG. Work involved design and development of a gas-air mixer for CNG, pumpless lubrication system for engine, cylinder heads for higher compression ratio, etc. Moreover, the studies for optimising the spark timing for improving CNG engine performance and effect of higher compression ratio on CNG emission, BSFC, etc. was conducted. Performance tests regarding power, BSFC, emission, etc. were conducted on baseline gasoline, bi-fuel CNG and dedicated CNG mode. Engine test bed results show that, on bi-fuel mode power loss is around 14 to 19%, which can be reduced to 5 to 10% in dedicated mode.

During the development of dual intake port for a lean burn engine, the conventional method of port characterization, using flow coefficients, was found to be inadequate. A suitable strategy was devised which uses the results from steady state flow bench to compute the total flow through the port at an indicative engine speed and for a particular valve lift behavior. A proper basis for comparison of the baseline single intake port with the developed dual intake port was thus arrived at.