The Experimental Validation of a New Thermodynamic Method for TDC Determination

In-cylinder pressure analysis is becoming more and more important both for research and development purpose and for control and diagnosis of internal combustion engines; directly measured by means of a combustion chamber pressure transducers or evaluated by analysing instantaneous engine speed [1,2,3,4], in-cylinder pressure allows the evaluation of indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP), combustion heat release, combustion phase, friction pressure, etc…It is well known to internal combustion engine researchers that for a right evaluation of these quantities the exact determination of Top Dead Centre (TDC) is of vital importance: a 1° error on TDC determination can lead to evaluation errors of about 10% on the IMEP and 25% on the heat released by the combustion. In this paper the authors present the experimental validation of an original thermodynamic method for the correct evaluation of the “loss angle”, i.e. the angular phase shift between the TDC location and the pressure peak location. The validation has been carried out on a spark ignition engine comparing the results of the thermodynamic method, whose input is the in-cylinder pressure acquired in a “motored” cylinder (i.e. without combustion), with those obtained from a commercial available TDC sensor. The comparative tests aimed to characterize the precision of the proposed method.