Waste Heat Recovery of Internal Combustion (IC) Engine

Objective:
In internal combustion(IC) Engine, waste heat recovery (WHR) through steam
injection into the cylinder for increasing the efficiency and working of internal
Combustion Engine.

Abstract
In this study, the approach of CSI for IC engine WHR was discussed based on a
heavy-duty NG engine. The thermodynamic processes of IC engine cycle coupling
with CSI cycle were investigated under three typical speeds of full load based on
the calibrated model, and then the effects of steam injection parameters on engine
performance especially thermal efficiency were studied. Results show that, the
improvement of engine thermal efficiency is determined by both steam injection
parameters and engine operating conditions. The earlier steam injection timing,
higher steam temperature and larger steam amount are beneficial for improving the
WHR efficiency. Although the higher steam temperature leads to lower steam
amount generated by waste heat, the maximum improvement of engine thermal
efficiency still appears at the highest steam temperature. Compared with original
engine, the thermal efficiency of this NG engine can be improved by at least 6%
points through steam injection, and the maximum improvement comes up to 6.6%
points at 2000 rpm. Accordingly, the engine indicated power is increased by
38.6 kW at the expense of 0.29 kW pumping power. All these demonstrate that this
WHR approach has great energy-saving potential for IC engine. To recover waste
heat and increase the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engines, an approach
based on in-cylinder steam–air expansion is proposed, which has simpler design
but higher practicality than previous methods. In the multi-cylinder engine, a
cylinder is specially used for steam expansion (called steam expansion cylinder)
without fuel entry and firing. The energy-saving potential and influencing factors
of this approach were investigated on a six-cylinder natural gas engine through the
simulation and some interesting findings were obtained. At the same engine
operating conditions, the steam temperature has greater effects on waste heat
recovery potential than steam amount. The cycle work of the steam expansion
cylinder is improved largely by introducing air. However, if further increase intake
pressure (e.g., greater than 0.4 bar), the improvement of cycle work in the steam
expansion cylinder is not obvious, thus the naturally aspirated mode is
recommended. When this approach is applied, the maximum brake mean effective
pressure is approximately equal to the level of the original engine at 1600 rpm and
2000 rpm but slightly lower at 1200 rpm. Nevertheless, the brake efficiency of the
engine has an obvious rise at all three speeds, which could increase by up to 5.7,
7.0 and 6.8 percentage points at 1200 rpm, 1600 rpm and 2000 rpm, respectively.
Therefore, the proposed approach can effectively recover engine waste heat with
little effect on power performance.

Introduction
With the rapid development of global economy and society, the threat of global
energy crisis arises and is becoming increasingly serious. As one of the largest
power machineries in the world, IC engine consumes about two-thirds of the
petroleum produced each year. From this viewpoint, the energy-saving of IC
engine is particularly important to ease the energy crisis and it is also a target for
lots of scientists and engineers. In terms of IC engine energy-saving, in recent
years, a large number of new technologies emerge, including turbocharging,
gasoline direct injection (GDI), lean-burn, homogeneous charge compression
ignition (HCCI etc. Although these new technologies can improve the performance
of IC engine from various aspects (e.g., combustion and emission performance),
the improvement of IC engine thermal efficiency is still very limited. From the
analysis of IC engine in-cylinder thermal balance, one can know that a large part of
fuel energy released by combustion is wasted through coolant and exhaust gas,
which restricts the improvement of IC engine thermal efficiency. For this reason,
to recover the waste heat of coolant and exhaust gas is a potential way to improve
the fuel utilization efficiency of IC engine. In recent years, the WHR for IC engine
becomes a research hotspot and attracts lots of attentions from both academia and
industry. To achieve the goal, a lot of researches have been conducted mainly in
two directions: one is the direct recovery methods based on exhaust gas expansion,
such as exhaust gas turbine system, turbo compounding and the other is the
indirect recovery methods based on heat transfer, such as Rankin cycle.Brayton air
cycle, thermoelectric generation systems and their improved means. In terms of the
indirect recovery, steam injection is a new research direction in recent years. In this
method, the water absorbs heat of coolant and exhaust gas in the heat exchanger
and then it is turned into steam. After that, the steam is injected into different
positions of the engine to improve the engine performance.

Pre-turbine steam

With regard to the steam injection at the turbine inlet, there are many domestic and
foreign related researches. The main goal of the pre-turbine steam injection is to
improve turbine performance of turbocharged engines. Zhu et al. stated that the
pre-turbine steam injection could increase the fuel economy of the engine by 3.2%.
Furthermore, they analyzed the thermodynamic processes of the combined
application of pre-turbine steam injection and the Miller cycle. The results showed
that the fuel economy under full load conditions can be improved by up to 5.9%
under steam injection but 7.4% under combined operation. Fu et al. Indicated that
pre-turbine steam injection can increase the torque by 25.0% over the exhaust
turbocharged engine and the thermal efficiency by 0.6% points at most at
1500 rpm.

Intake-manifold steam injection

Although pre-turbine steam injection can improve the power and economy of the
engine, it will cause an increase in exhaust back pressure and pumping loss.
Besides, the steam does not participate in the in-cylinder combustion, so this
method cannot improve the engine emissions. In addition, since the increase of
turbine power is only used for turbocharging, the increase of engine power mainly
depends on the matching strategy between engine and turbocharging system.
Compared with pre-turbine steam injection, the intake-manifold steam injection is
another way to improve the engine performance and solve the corrosion problem
caused by liquid water injection. An experiment research by Cesar. The engine
torque and effective power are increased by up to 4.65% at 3200 rpm, specific fuel
consumption is reduced by up to 6.44% at 2000 rpm. Through studying the
influences of intake-manifold steam injection on performance of diesel engines
with different alternative fuels, Gonca et al. found that the NO emissions are
significantly reduced by up to 34%, and meanwhile the effective efficiency and
brake power of the engine fueled mixture are increased by up to 12.5% and 4.1%
under the condition of steam injection, respectively. Immediately, a series of
researches about the influences of combined application of the steam injection
method, Miller cycle and turbocharging techniques on diesel engine were
conducted by Gonca et al. They found that the combined application effectively
improves the power, fuel economy and emissions of the engine. The improvement
in the brake power and effective thermal efficiency is 18% and 12%, respectively.

Cylinder steam injection(CSI)

Although the intake-manifold steam injection is effective in improving engine

performance, there are still some disadvantages. On one hand, because the water
enters the intake pipe in the saturated state, and the temperature of the intake
manifold is lower than that of the saturated water, the saturated water can not
completely evaporate, which leads to a certain degree of corrosion. On the other
hand, the temperature of the intake air increases, which leads to the reduction of
intake air mass so it will be bad for the engine performance. Furthermore,
considering the disadvantage of steam injection at both turbine inlet and intake
manifold, some researchers began to study the in-cylinder steam injection. Zhao
et al. built a simulation model for a diesel engine to study the impacts of different
water/steam injection layouts on the fuel saving potentials. The investigation
results showed that the in-cylinder steam injection can reduce the fuel consumption
by 10% at engine 1300 rpm condition. Zhang et al. [36] also numerically
investigated the potential for fuel savings and NOx emission reduction obtained by
this method. They found that the engine torque is increased by 9.5–10.9% and
brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) is reduced by 8.6–9.9% with the in-
cylinder steam injection. Moreover, researched the influences of steam direct
injection parameters on the NG engine performance. The results showed that the
steam direct injection can significantly decrease the BSFC by 3.9–5.2% at all
speeds when the steam temperature, injection pressure and timing are 550 K,
40 bar and 50deg, respectively.

In our previous study, an open steam power cycle was proposed for IC engine
WHR, in which the steam generated by the engine waste heat is injected into an
independent expansion cylinder. Although the WHR method shows great energy-
saving potential, it is inconvenient to be directly applied on IC engine and
meanwhile the power performance of IC engine decreases since a cylinder is used
as the independent expansion cylinder without fuel injection and firing. To solve
these problems, another improved method for the open steam power cycle was
discussed, in which the steam is directly injected into the firing cylinder during the
in-cylinder gas expansion process. The goals of this study are: 1) To verify the
availability of this improved steam power cycle (CSI method) by numerical
calculation and theoretical analysis; 2) To reveal the energy-saving potential of this
steam injection approach by comparing with the exiting studies; 3) To explain the
influence mechanisms of operating parameters on cycle performance and find the
optimal combination of operating parameters with the actual exhaust boundary
conditions considered. For these purposes, this WHR approach was applied in a
NG engine and then studied by combining with numerical calculation and
theoretical analysis. Different from other similar studies including steam injection
in engine cylinder, in this study not only the improvement of engine thermal
efficiency was revealed, but also the effects of steam parameters on the
thermodynamic process and emissions of combined cycle were discussed,
including: 1) the effect of steam injection parameters on specific heat ratio of
mixture gas and then heat-work conversion process of IC engine; 2) the effective
region of steam temperature and the correlation between steam parameters and
exhaust boundary conditions; 3) the influence of steam injection on in-cylinder
heat transfer and gas exchange processes. Furthermore, the suggestions to improve
the energy-saving potential of CSI method were provided. All these not only
extend the studies on IC engine WHR, but also are helpful for developing the
energy-saving technologies for IC engine.
Methodology
Working principles of CSI cycle
The schematic diagram of the CSI cycle for IC engine WHR is depicted in Fig. 1.
As demonstrated, an open steam power cycle system is coupled to IC engine
exhaust pipe and coolant system, which is used to recover IC engine waste heat
(both exhaust heat and coolant heat) and improve the power performance and fuel
efficiency of IC engine. According to Fig. 1, the working principles of CSI cycle
are introduced as follows. As shown, the CSI cycle consists of several key
components, including valve,

1. Energy distribution of NG engine

To verify the energy-saving potential (or recovery potential of waste heat) of this
CSI cycle, it was applied to an in-line six-cylinder, spark ignition, single point
injection heavy-duty NG engine, the specifications of which are listed in Table 1.
In general, the exhaust heat of NG engine is higher and the speed range is smaller
than that of gasoline engine, both of the two aspects are more suitable for WHR.
So as to provide the basis for comparative studies, the thermal balance test for this

2. Effect of steam injection timing

Firstly, the effect of steam injection timing on the NG engine performance
especially the improvement of engine thermal efficiency is discussed. The
parameter setting for the model of steam injection timing sweeping is listed in
Table 2. It is worth mentioning that three typical speeds (1000 rpm, 1400 rpm and
2000 rpm) are chosen for this study, which cover the low, medium and high speed
of NG engine. Fig. 8(a)-(e) show the performance parameters of NG engine
coupling with CSI cycle at

3. Waste heat characteristics of IC engine

An in-line six-cylinder, four-stroke, spark ignition, single point port injection
turbocharged natural gas (NG) engine was taken as the research object, the
specifications of which are listed in Table 1. In order to provide detailed data for
the design of WHR system, the thermal balance test of target engine was
conducted at full load and various kinds of energy flow were analyze.
 4. Effect of intake pressure
In the proposed WHR method, the SEC is independent of other firing cylinders and
operates at the naturally aspirated (NA) mode. As is well known, the intake
pressure is a very important parameter for the IC engine cycle performance. Now,
there comes a question how the intake pressure of SEC influences the performance
of CSAE cycle. To answer this question, the numerical model was performed at
different intake pressures of SEC. In order to reveal the maximum recovery
potential of

Conclusions
In this study, the approach of CSI for IC engine WHR was discussed in detail, and
the thermodynamic processes of this combined cycle were investigated under three
typical speeds of full load. On this basis, the effects of steam injection parameters
on the performance of this combined cycle were studied, and the following
conclusions can be safely arrived at.

 The steam injection timing has a great influence on the expansion

work (thermal efficiency and IMEP) but little influence on other.
 By introducing air into cylinder, the cycle work of SEC has an
obvious rise.

Acknowledgements
This research work is jointly sponsored by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 51876056), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities. The authors appreciate the reviewers and the editor for their
careful reading and many constructive comments and suggestions on improving
the manuscript.
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