A low cost air hybrid concept

This article is a pre-print version of the full and final article which is available at the link below.Copyright © 2010 Institut français du pétrole Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFP must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee: Request permission from Documentation, Institut français du pétrole, fax. +33 1 47 52 70 78, or [email protected] air hybrid engine absorbs the vehicle kinetic energy during braking, stores it in an air tank in the form of compressed air, and reuses it to propel a vehicle during cruising and acceleration. Capturing, storing and reusing this braking energy to give additional power can therefore improve fuel economy, particularly in cities and urban areas where the traffic conditions involve many stops and starts. In order to reuse the residual kinetic energy, the vehicle operation consists of 3 basic modes, i.e. Compression Mode (CM), Expander Mode (EM) and normal firing mode. Unlike previous works, a low cost air hybrid engine has been proposed and studied. The hybrid engine operation can be realised by means of production technologies, such as VVT and valve deactivation. In this work, systematic investigation has been carried out on the performance of the hybrid engine concept through detailed gas dynamic modelling using Ricardo WAVE software. Valve timing optimization has been done for the more efficient operation of air hybrid operation and obtaining higher braking and Motoring mean effective pressure for CM and EM respectively.EPSR