Diesel engine system design

The diesel engine is recognized as the most promising powertrain in the foreseeable future due to its superior thermal efficiency and reliability. The diesel engine has been widely used in commercial vehicles, industrial applications and today’s passenger cars and light-duty trucks. Modern emissions standards and customer demands are driving diesel engineering to become a fast growing applied engineering discipline in order to meet the requirements of designing optimum diesel engines. The engineering population in diesel engine design is growing fast. The need for advanced design theories and professional reference books has become pressing and obvious. This book presents my own experience and findings in many interrelated areas of diesel engine performance analysis and system design. The book also intends to establish an emerging area of diesel engine system design for the diesel industry.

 Diesel engine design is very complex. It involves many people and companies from OEM (original equipment manufacturer) to suppliers. 

A system design approach to set up correct engine performance specifications is essential in order to streamline the process. While working at Navistar, a global leading manufacturer of diesel engines and trucks, I noticed several common challenges existing in today’s engine industry:

. Certain disconnections between academic education and industrial design practice (i.e., sometimes engineers do not know how to apply their classroom engine knowledge to analysis or design in their daily  work).

 The lack of comprehensive explanatory references or textbooks on the design approaches related to diesel engine performance and system integration. People have to rely on scattered literatures of published technical papers, unpublished company reports, and the oral accounts of engineers working in each related field. Unfortunately, very often this scattered information does not provide the direct answer to the needs of a practicing engineer for his daily design challenges.

The diesel engine is a sophisticated electro-mechanical machine. The system attributes of a diesel engine can be classified into four categories, namely performance, durability, packaging, and cost. Among them, performance (or function) is the leading attribute. Both static (steady state) design and dynamic (transient) design are important to satisfy the performance requirements of the diesel engine. As an industrial commercial product, the diesel engine needs to be designed not only for nominal target performance, but also for taking into account statistical variability and reliability. Engine performance and system design is such a broad area that it affects almost everyone in the engine design business.

 

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