Development of waste heatrecovery systems for mobileheavy duty applications

The focus of today’s automotive industry is to reduce emissions and fuel consumption of all vehicles. Concentrating on the truck industry, the last 20 years have focused largely on cutting emissions of particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. For the future, attention will be focused on fuel consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide. Waste heat recovery appears to be a very promising concept for fuel economy on long haul heavy duty Diesel trucks. After a general introduction on the concept of waste heat recovery and the Rankine cycle, this thesis work shows how to model and calibrate a cooling system circuit for a heavy duty Diesel engine equipped with a waste heat recovery system. Then an overview of the current transmission systems that are suitable to transfer energy from the waste heat recovery expander to the engine shaft is presented. For all transmission architectures, input speed range, speed ratio range, transmission efficiency as well as weight and size are detailed and compared to each other. Finally, these systems are modeled and integrated to a complete vehicle Simulink simulation platform and simulations are run on two highway driving cycles. Resulting average recovered powers and fuel consumptions are compared and the analysis finally shows that a gear train transmission has the best performance for this kind of driving cycle