Laboratory alignment procedure for improving reproducibility of tyre wet grip measurement

Since 2012, the Korean and EU governments have been running a tyre labelling system. All tyres sold in Korea have to carry a label that displays information of two performance criteria: rolling resistance and wet grip. The rolling resistance of the tyres determines their fuel efficiency grading, and the wet grip of the tyres determines their braking safety grading. The rolling resistance and wet grip measurements must be reproducible, so the same tests on the same tyres in different laboratories must produce the same results to ensure a fair comparison between tyres from different suppliers. In addition, a good reproducibility of testing results prevents market surveillance authorities from obtaining results different from those provided by suppliers when testing the same tyres. The laboratory alignment procedure for the rolling resistance measurements was developed and published as the EU Commission Regulation No. 1235 in 2011. However, the laboratory alignment procedure for the wet grip measurements has not yet been developed. Therefore, there are many differences in the wet grip test results among test laboratories throughout the world. The new procedure that is proposed for the wet grip measurement alignment for tyre testing laboratories can improve the reproducibility of the wet grip testing results, and five laboratory alignment tests were carried out between KATECH and five other test laboratories in the world to evaluate the results of the proposed procedure.     

Influence of pilot injection on combustion characteristics and emissions in a DI diesel engine fueled with diesel and DME

This work experimentally investigates how the dwell time between pilot injection and main injection influences combustion and emissions characteristics (NOx, CO, THC and smoke) in a single-cylinder DI diesel engine. The experiments were conducted using two fuel injection systems according to the fuel type, diesel or dimethyl ether (DME), due to the different fuel characteristics. The injection strategy is accomplished by varying the dwell time (10°CA, 16°CA and 22°CA) between injections at five main injection timings (?4°CA aTDC, ?2°CA aTDC, 0°CA aTDC, 2°CA aTDC and 4°CA aTDC). Results from pilot-main injection conditions are compared with those shown in single injection conditions to better demonstrate the potential of pilot injection. It was found that pilot injection is highly effective for lowering heat-release rates with smooth pressure traces regardless of the fuel type. Pilot injection also offers high potential to maintain or increase the BMEP; even the combustion-timing is retarded to suppress the NOx emission formation. Overall, NOx emission formation was suppressed more by the combustion phasing retard effect, and not the pilot injection effect considered in this study. Comparison of the emissions for different fuel types shows that CO and HC emissions have low values below 100 ppm for DME operation in both single injection and pilot-main injection. However, NOx emission is slightly higher in the earlier main injection timings (?4°CA aTDC, ?2°CA aTDC) than diesel injections. Pilot injection was found to be more effective with DME for reducing the amount of NOx emission with combustion retardation, which indicates a level of NOx emission similar to that of diesel. Although the diesel pilot-main injection conditions show higher smoke emission than single-injection condition, DME has little smoke emission regardless of injection strategy.