The Use of a Water/Lube Oil Heat Exchanger and Enhanced Cooling Water Heating to Increase Water and Lube Oil Heating Rates in Passenger Cars for Reduced Fuel Consumption and CO2 Emissions During Cold Start.

Lubricating oil takes all of the NEDC test cycle time to reach 90°C. Hence, this gives high friction losses throughout the test cycle, which leads to a significant increase in the fuel consumption. In real world driving, particularly in congested traffic, it is shown that lube oil warm-up is even slower than in the NEDC. Euro 1, 2 and 4 Ford Mondeo water and oil warm up rates in real world urban driving were determined and shown to be comparable with the results of Kunze et al. (2) for a BMW on the NEDC. This paper explores the use of forced convective heat exchange between the cooling water and the lube oil during the warm-up period. A technique of a step warm-up of the engine at 32 Nm at 2000 rpm (35% of peak power) was used and the engine lube oil and water temperature monitored. It was shown that the heat exchanger results in an increase in lube oil temperature by 4°C, which increased to 10°C if enhanced heat transfer to the water was used from an exhaust port heat exchanger. The impact of sfc was 8 and 14% respectively, during the first 6 minutes from cold start.