Engine Testing & Development
Regulatory and economic forces continue to drive powertrain development to produce more fuel efficient engines that emit fewer greenhouse gasses. The simplest solution would be to build smaller, less powerful engines, but today’s customer will not accept such a compromise. Furthermore, while electrification is a valid alternative, it is rather expensive, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. As a result, OEMs must still produce green, efficient, powerful, and economical gasoline and diesel engines to remain competitive.
Challenges
Going forward, the best way to make more powerful and more efficient engines is to make them more complex. All of the simple gains in engine development are well known and were made years ago. Today we continue the trend toward systems that allow fine-grained control of operation at any and all operating modes of the engine. Gasoline direct injection (GDI), variable valve timing (via multiple methods), and variable geometry turbo chargers (VGT) are just a few examples of technologies that are being developed and extended to meet engine development needs going forward.
Each system added to the engine design drives the need for new control systems inside the engine ECU, as well as tighter integration with the transmission ECU. As more complex systems are added, the development and testing process becomes very difficult to manage and complete on schedule and within budget.
The A&D Solution
A&D Technology can provide a complete turnkey solution or individual components that can be integrated into your existing systems easily. A typical A&D test cell solution might include:
- iTest data acquisition and control system
- CAS/Phoenix combustion analysis
- ADX Hardware-in-the-Loop SImulation
- LabCentral lab management tool
- LabMinder cell monitoring system