After years of study and improvement, turbochargers in passenger cars now generally have very high efficiency. This is advantageous, but on the other hand, due to their high efficiency, only a small portion of the exhaust energy is needed for compressing the intake air, which means further utilization of waste heat is restricted. From this point of view, a turbo-compounding arrangement has significant advantage over a turbocharger in converting exhaust energy as it is immune to the upper power demand limit of the compressor.
However, with the power turbine being located in series with the main turbine, power losses are incurred due to the higher back pressure which increases the pumping losses. This paper evaluates the effectiveness that the turbo-compounding arrangement has on a 2.0 litres gasoline engine and seeks to draw a conclusion on whether the produced power is sufficient to offset the increased pumping work. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the baseline engine model in this paper is not a heavy-duty diesel engine which is more appropriate to the turbo compounding mechanism for automotive application, but a small size gasoline engine. This paper also aims to explore a potential methodology for extending the operating range of the turbo compounding in light-duty petrol engine over its entire speed range under full load condition. The system models in this paper were built in GT-Power which is a one dimension (1-D) engine simulation code. Simulation results show that with the assistance of a variably driven supercharger, the output torque of the engine system is much larger (up to around 24%) at lower engine speeds. The fuel economy is also improved by up to about 8%.