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Vehicle Engines and Powertrains: Performance, Combustion and Emission—2nd Edition

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Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The increasingly stringent regulations in terms of pollutant emissions and CO₂ emission targets are pushing companies in the automotive sector to investigate innovative technological solutions for engines and powertrains, which include powertrain electrification, innovative air-path and fuel-path control, innovative combustion concepts, advanced aftertreatment systems, sensor-based and model-based control of the combustion and emission formation processes, alternative fuels, techniques for the optimization of the powertrain energy fluxes and their integration with the emerging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems, as well as by means of artificial intelligence.

Taking into account this scenario, this Special Issue aims to encourage both academic and industrial researchers to present their latest findings concerning the previously mentioned aspects, which can lead to a significant contribution towards the achievement of green and sustainable mobility.

The authors should provide a comprehensive and scientifically sound overview of the most recent research and methodological approaches. Both experimental and methodological contributions are welcome.

Dr. Roberto Finesso
Guest Editor

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Keywords

internal combustion engines
powertrain electrification
powertrain and engine optimization
powertrain and engine modeling and control
emission formation modeling and control
air-path and fuel-path control
innovative combustion concepts
advanced aftertreatment systems
alternative fuels
artificial intelligence systems
model-in-the-loop (MiL), hardware-in-the-loop (HiL), rapid prototyping (RP)
energy management optimization algorithms

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23 pages, 11115 KB

Open AccessArticle

Estimation of Heat Release and In-Cylinder Pressure in Diesel Engines from Basic Testbed Data

by Roberto Finesso, Francesco Guidotti and Stefano d’Ambrosio

Energies 2025, 18(22), 5912; https://doi.org/10.3390/en18225912 - 10 Nov 2025

Viewed by 572

Abstract

The present paper proposes a novel approach for the estimation of the in-cylinder pressure and heat release in diesel engines from basic testbed measurements (i.e., brake mean effective pressure (BMEP), gross indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP360), peak firing pressure (PFP), crank angle at which 50% of fuel mass has burnt (MFB50) and exhaust gas temperature (T_exh). The method exploits a previously developed low-throughput combustion model, based on the accumulated fuel mass approach, which has been tuned by a genetic algorithm (GA) optimizer. The latter adjusts the main combustion model parameters to minimize an objective function, which depends on the prediction errors of BMEP, IMEP360, PFP, MFB50 and T_exh. Several scenarios were evaluated in which different subsets of the four previous quantities were assumed to be known from experimental activities. The proposed method is particularly useful when in-cylinder pressure traces are unavailable and only basic testbed data exist. The results show that the in-cylinder pressure and heat release profiles are estimated with a high level of accuracy, since the root mean squared error is of the order of 1–2.5 bar and 2–2.7 × 10⁻² kJ, respectively, depending on the considered scenario, while requiring a modest computational effort which is of the order of 3–6 min per test. Moreover, the low-throughput nature of the method makes it straightforward for other researchers to implement and reproduce results on different engines. The approach is also fuel-independent and can be applied to engines running on alternative/zero-carbon fuels, which are currently being extensively studied as potential ways to reduce the environmental impact of internal combustion engines. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vehicle Engines and Powertrains: Performance, Combustion and Emission—2nd Edition)

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