This £4.2m project is designed to create a supercharged engine with the same power output as the current 5.0 liter V8 with a 35% reduction in CO2 emissions.
This £4.2m project is designed to create a supercharged engine with the same power output as the current 5.0 liter V8 with a 35% reduction in CO2 emissions.
Jaguar Land Rover’s chief engineer, Malcolm Sandford, said: “This hugely challenging project will help provide a range of technologies that will form the core of our engine downsizing, down-cylindering and down-speeding strategy.”
The three-year project is funded as part of England’s second Technology Strategy Board competition under its Integrated Delivery Program, which aims to reduce CO2 emissions and accelerate the introduction of low-carbon vehicles onto the roads.
Jaguar Land Rover will be working closely with the universities of Bath, Leeds, and Imperial College London, as well as Shell, Lotus Engineering, GE Precision Engineering and CD-adapco on what’s been termed the “Ultra Boost” project. The challenge is to increase the density of air entering the engine enough to increase power output but without impacting engine size.
“The essential thing is to get the engine to behave as if it’s a small engine most of the time when you don’t need the high power output,” Chris Brace, project investigator and senior lecturer at Bath University, told The Engineer magazine. “And you’ve got to manage the transition effectively so that when you need the power it arrives quickly without hesitation and in a way that delivers refinement.”
Sounds simple enough.
“You don’t want to be driving a lot of air-charge management equipment at times when you don’t need it,” said Brace. “[You want] to get the very high power density at some points but to prevent that from becoming a parasitic loss on the engine at other times.”
The project will use an air-charging facility of Bath University’s Powertrain & Vehicle Research Center to investigate how to vary the flow rate, temperature and pressure of the air entering the engine.
Researchers at Imperial will design the supercharger while Leeds will provide expertise on combustion to ensure the engine responds at the specific high outputs required.
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