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Wireless Temperature Sensors Allow Us to ‘See’ Inside ICEs

Wireless temperature sensors installed in pistons allow us to “see” inside the combustion chamber while an engine is running. The ascertained data is used to create models of flame propagation, temperature distribution, and combustion events. Watch this video to “see” more.

Topics:
Automotive Data Acquisition Sensors

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 hey guys my name is Luke Shannon and I'm a graduate student at Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research and today I got a really cool tour to show you of some of the experiments we're doing in one of our engine Labs let's check it [Music] out all right guys this is one of our engine labs and this is one of

    00:00:22 professors Dr Lawler hey Luke thanks for stopping by um happy to show you our lab and show you what we're working on today all right great what do you guys got going on all right so come over here and we'll show you a little bit about this engine uh this is a 13 L 6-cylinder heavyduty truck engine this is the type of engine that is out of a class eight truck oftentimes called an 18wheeler

    00:00:45 casually or sometimes called a semi so these engines are working incredibly hard for civilization and Society to pull a lot of goods uh transport a lot of things all across the country um we would love to try to improve the efficiency and reduce R the emissions of these types of engines and a long-term goal would be to try to get them running on some sort of renewable fuel but let's

    00:01:06 show you a little bit more about what we're working on specifically with this engine so clearly we've taken the engine completely apart and we have one of the components over here which is the Piston so this is the Piston out of one of the cylinders of that six-cylinder engine you can see we we previously ran it you might be able to see the soot uh plumes impinged on the surface of this

    00:01:30 pist and you can see that we have computer models of the Piston as well and in addition to all the experiments that we do we also do modeling and simulation so we'll tell you a little bit more about that all right so this is mohip Kumar who's a PhD student uh who does a lot of our uh CAD modeling um our computational fluid dynamics modeling that's modeling

    00:01:53 where we solve for all of the fluid flows and even combustion processes that go on inside the cylinder of an engine so moit show us a little bit more of the cab so here you can see the cad of the Piston that we were just holding and moad if you rotate that around we can see different sides of the Piston you can start to see the wrist pin bore you can see all the different

    00:02:20 dimensions that we have in this CAD model what we then do is we take this CAD model and we import it into a software that we use that does computational fluid dynamics modeling and it's called converge cfd and here it is so this is the software where we import all of those geometries and we solve for those fluid flows as the intake air comes in through the intake

    00:02:44 through the intake valves um as the valves open and closed and the Piston moves up and down in the cylinder all of that is solved for in here to eventually solve for that combustion process and uh the thermodynamic cycle that goes on and we'll show you a video animation of that over here so here is this video animation of the combustion process in this engine you can see the fuel sprays

    00:03:08 come in there are eight of them is that right okay perfect there are there are eight uh spray plumes that come in let me run that video for you again and it shows um the spray coming in and then burning as it mixes with the air that's the diesel combustion process it's a very heterogeneous process meaning there's a large amount of Radiance locally in the cylinder so some

    00:03:32 regions may only have air and other regions only have fuel and everything in between and it burns while it mixes I'm seeing you got a bunch of different colors there can you kind of give us an idea of what the color gradients and what the colors represent yeah great question so as the fuel comes in it mixes with the air and it burns and when it burns it gets very hot um so those

    00:03:52 color gradients are actually uh different temperatures that are going on in the cylinder and the temperatures in the cylinder go anywhere from 400 500 Kelvin up to uh maybe over 2,000 Kelvin locally in these uh spray plumes and those are the measurements you're taking with the Piston those are basically temperature measurements with thermocouples exactly so all of the all

    00:04:15 of the temperatures that you see in this graph are all temperatures of the working fluid meaning of the gas the air that's in the cylinder but what we then do is take the those simulations and we take the heat flux that comes out of those simulations and put them as the input conditions to a um finite element solver which basically solves for the heat being imposed on the surface of a

    00:04:40 metal component and in this case this is a top down view of the piston and this is how that combustion process causes the Piston to locally heat up under each one of those eight plumes so what we then do is we um we wanted to instrument a piston just as you said Luke so um we took uh we took a piston and we took our simulations and we decided where we wanted to put different sensor locations

    00:05:07 for temperature sensors and you can see that in this graph here where we have different locations in the plume or just off the plume these locations were picked intentionally to try to resolve the gradients of temperature that you can see exist due to those spray plumes and here's a picture on the right that shows a piston that was instrumented with these different

    00:05:30 thermocouples we call them those are just temperature sensors at different locations around the Piston uh we have Kunal vpath who's a PhD student and he's going to show us a little bit more about the physical Hardware so this is our instrumented piston it is identical to the stock one it has both sub surface or embedded thermocouples or and surface thermocouples and the cool part about

    00:05:53 this is it has wireless charging for the thermo coues and a wireless transmitter so as the Sy moves from Top Dead Center to bottom dead center it the system gets charged each time it is at bottom dead center and we can take a look at the charging Hardware inside the okay that's awesome so basically you have wireless data being transmitted and of course because the Piston is moving

    00:06:15 up and down in a cylinder bore um and it's not fixed like the head if you had thermal couples in the head it would be easier just to wire it up hardwired but because it's in a piston that's moving up and down the boore we need to have a way to do it wirelessly exactly you wouldn't be able to get those wires out of the cylinder if you if you try to do it in a wired way so we need to do it

    00:06:33 wirelessly so this is the the cylinder liner that these guys removed from this block and you can see that's just a regular liner but now Kunal will show you a little bit more about the this new instrumented liner that has that inductive power supply in the bottom of it you look inside the cylinder you can see uh the charging coil for the wireless charging system and it is

    00:06:57 hardwire and the wire will be done through the to a hole in the block the little square device right there at the bottom got it okay and then how do you transmit it through is there a port over here is that what this is right here through the sidewall so that's those are the wireless antenas we have two on each side and they they will be connected to

    00:07:19 a a DA box which will then transmit it to the computer so essentially we can get power from that little square we showed you by looking to the cylinder boore but to get the actual data signal out you need to use these antennas so this is actually what wirelessly receives the data signal and we had to drill holes into this engine block it was a little bit scary so just to show

    00:07:42 you a little bit more obviously the head is off and the oil pan is off if you get down there you can actually see the crankshaft under the engine um and you can see that five out of the six cylinders are exactly the way that they would be and we're only instrumenting this one cylinder cylinder number two with this inductive power supply and these antennas so that we can measure

    00:08:04 the temperatures at different locations on the Pistons and that's why you see five out of the six Pistons are still in the engine and the other thing we can show you I guess is the head and uh this particular head has a a split head so this is the lower half of it that has the valves all right yep I see that pretty cool all the valve springs right there

    00:08:25 and valve train and one thing that's unique about this particular head are these ports these are actually ports that are machined in so that's not in a production engine this is only in this research engine they're machined in so that we can put a sensor down through that port to measure the pressure in the cylinder and then what do we have over here this is the other part of that head

    00:08:44 exactly so it's a split head where the lower half houses the valves and the upper half houses the cam shafts and that's what you see here so these guys as uh PhD students took this whole engine apart just so we could get to that piston and that cylinder liner swap them out and and now they're going to start the process of rebuilding the whole engine so that we can run it and

    00:09:03 measure that data Okay cool so how long uh does a project like this typically last ah great question often times um it can be years so we've been working on this for um probably about a year and a half and we're looking forward to taking the data over the next six months so it'll be about a two-year project but to do all of the modeling and simulation to get that initial set of data and then

    00:09:25 tear down the engine put put this instrumented piston in build it back up and run the engine again it takes a long time all right awesome is there anything else you guys want to share about this engine or this experiment or uh anybody wants to get more information where should they go yeah we're happy to always talk more about our work um if you're looking for more information

    00:09:44 there's a lot of great content on this YouTube channel so please feel free to check out all of those videos there's also links to uh various websites related to our department and the different programs we have as well as the research Labs so please feel free to check all of those out uh and then if you still have questions please feel free to out by email we'd be happy to

    00:10:00 direct you to the right place or try to answer your question over email or Zoom awesome all right thank you Dr law appreciate it yeah thank you Luke