Development of a Water Rankine System to Improve Diesel Engine Efficiency

Abstract

One way to increase the thermal efficiency of a diesel engine is to recover the waste heat from the exhaust gases and from the cooling system. For the stationary diesel engine, used to generate electrical power, this heat may be converted in useful energy by a cogeneration system, in order to ensure hot water production. For the automotive diesel engine, however, the solution is not applicable therefore a method has to be developed in order to generate mechanical power. In this paper the authors show the design and the simulation performed with the AMESIM software tools for a heat recovery system dedicated to a diesel engine. The engine is simulated with the specific library of the software and the obtained results are used in the second part of the paper concerning the recovery system. The simulation results presented in this paper obviously need to be confronted to the experimental data before validating the prediction capability of the model so that this one could become an important tool in the efforts to emphasize how can be reduced the fuel consumption for truck diesel engines using the on board heat recovery.