Methodology to Evaluate the Performance of Diesel Engine Cold Starts using Engine Speed Profile Analysis

摘要

The development of new fuels involves several areas of an oil company and several tests, including vehicle emissions tests on chassis dynamometers and engine performance tests on engine bench laboratory. Particularly for diesel and blends of gasoline fuels, an important test is to evaluate the engine speed profile during the vehicle cold start. In this work, for engine speed profile analysis, it was developed a system to acquire data using the engine's flywheel ring gear information and the audio input of a standard notebook computer. It was also developed a specific software to analyze the acquired signals. The system is able to point out several important features of the engine start such as the starter motor beginning of operation, the maximum engine speed during the start time, the settling time and the engine idling speed. All of this information can be collected using a low cost set of instrumentation devices. This system is also able to analyze, for a single revolution of the engine, small variations in engine speed. Thus, this paper proposes a simple and low cost procedure, which can be performed by any laboratory, for engine speed analysis of different vehicles and engines.