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ENGINE DOWNSIZING USING ELECTRICALLY DRIVEN SUPERCHARGER

Conference Paper · June 2011

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ENGINE DOWNSIZING USING ELECTRICALLY DRIVEN
SUPERCHARGER
Dhand, Aditya*1, Cho, Baekhyun1, Villegas, Javier1, Svancara, Kamil1, Gao, Bo1, Wieltsch,
Martin1, Thornton, Warren2, Etemad, Shahram2, Parra, Juan2 and Taylor, Rob3

1 AVL Powertrain UK Ltd, United Kingdom

2 Dynamic Boosting Systems Ltd, United Kingdom
3 Turbocam Europe Ltd, United Kingdom

KEYWORDS: Supercharger, Downsizing, Fuel economy, Engine, Simulation

ABSTRACT

Stricter fuel consumption and emission regulations have put worldwide car makers and
suppliers under pressure to develop more efficient vehicle systems. Engine downsizing by
supercharging has gained significant interest due to benefits of lower fuel costs and reduced
emission pollutants with marked performance gains. The supercharging systems, utilizing
both positive displacement and turbo compressors, typically suffer from ‘linear charging’,
inefficiency, and lack of durability. Both technologies are driven by belt, sometimes geared,
and offer engine charging whether required or not.

To overcome linear charging, electrically driven machines have been devised that use
conventional (back-swept) turbo machine designs at ultra-high speed via a high ratio step-
down gear box or a very high speed electric motor. These suffer from parasitic losses,
inefficiency and high cost due to costly bearings, gearbox and motor/driver. Turbochargers
that utilize exhaust energy are therefore preferred to superchargers despite turbo-lag. An
electrically driven supercharger (EDS) using TurboClawTM technology crucially operates at
low speed enabling direct motor drive. This provides the additional benefit of offering engine
charging only when it is actually required.

In the reported work, an electrically-driven supercharger supporting downsizing of engines

with a displacement of 1.4 L is developed. The system comprises an innovative low specific
speed turbo-compressor driven by a brushless DC motor. The system performance has been
simulated for fuel economy reduction on a supercharged 1.0 L gasoline engine in a B-segment
vehicle as compared to a 1.4 L naturally aspirated engine whilst maintaining the vehicle
performance. A control strategy for the system has been developed and integrated into the
system. A prototype and a specially designed test rig have been built and the control
functionality has been tested on Hardware in the Loop (HiL) rig. The results from the
simulation and the testing show significant improvement in fuel economy on the NEDC cycle
while delivering high speed acceleration target vehicle performance. Other variants such as
combining the system with a turbocharger have also been investigated.

INTRODUCTION

To reduce CO2 emissions engine downsizing appears to be a promising way to improve

engine efficiency and is therefore increasingly applied to available vehicles. Engine
downsizing means reducing the engine’s displacement without compromising driveability.
Such an engine provides a better fuel economy in official driving cycles and in real world
usage as well. The reason for this improvement in fuel economy is that the engine can operate
at a relatively higher load under the same power requirement. Using a smaller engine means
less friction losses and throttling losses, especially at low power requirement, where the
efficiency of large gasoline engines is usually low.

For increasing the specific engine output in terms of torque and power, various technology
methods exist. One way to achieve this is by increasing the pressure of the air which streams
into the cylinders of a combustion engine, generally referred to as ‘charging’. This charging
requires a compressor at the inlet of the engine. In a turbocharger, the compressor is driven by
a turbine in the exhaust stream, which is in turn driven by the exhaust gases. This compressor
wheel then increases the intake air pressure of the engine, thereby increasing torque and
power. Efficiency improvements come from being able to substitute a smaller turbocharged
engine for a larger engine. In a supercharger, a mechanical compressor is usually driven by a
belt from the crankshaft and doesn’t use energy from the exhaust gases. They are generally
positive displacement compressors, mechanically driven by the engine and are therefore
dependent on engine speed. They provide boost all the time, which provides more power at
the expense of higher fuel usage.

An alternative technology is the Electrically Driven Supercharger (EDS), which is a

compressor driven by an electric motor. Being independent of engine speed allows the engine
to provide more power only when it is required. The focus of this work is on small engines
and with existing compressor technology, the required speed for EDS is very high (175k
rpm). High speeds lead to problems with motors, drives, and bearings, resulting in higher
costs and lower reliability. This is where the application of low-speed turbo-compressor
TurboClaw™, which performs at the flow rates usually provided by positive displacement
supercharger, becomes an interesting technology in engine charging.

The system comprises an innovative low specific speed turbo-compressor driven by a

brushless DC motor. The system performance has been simulated for fuel economy reduction
on a supercharged 1.0 L gasoline engine in a B-segment vehicle as compared to a 1.4 L
naturally aspirated (NA) engine whilst maintaining the vehicle performance. A control
strategy for the system has been developed and integrated into the system. A prototype and a
specially designed test rig have been built and the control functionality has been tested on
Hardware in the loop (HiL) rig.

TURBOCLAWTM COMPRESSOR BACKGROUND

Turbo-compressors offer low parts-count and cost when compared to positive displacement
compressors and are preferable to piston, screw, and scroll compressors for high-flow rates.
Turbo-compressors are however not suitable for low flow-rate applications such as gas fuel
compression, air management systems in fuel cells, and final stages of multi-stage industrial
compressors. The low flow-rate requires small diameters but operating at extremely high
speed to achieve high pressures, leading to high cost drives and bearings and low efficiencies.

The patented TurboClaw™ technology (1) is a shrouded, forward-swept turbomachine design

with innovative blade profile. TurboClaw™ operates at much lower rotor tip speeds than
conventional radial compressors for low flow rates, lowering the stresses and noise inherent in
the design. The lower speed operation also improves operational reliability and enables use of
standard bearings and motor technology. TurboClaw™ impeller geometry is simple, requiring
conventional materials and enabling low cost manufacture. TurboClaw™ is a low specific-
speed turbomachine. The figure 1 shows the design.

Figure 1: TurboClaw™ compressor wheel (2 sizes)

The TurboClaw™ innovation has the following advantages:

 Compact, low specific-speed, oil-free operation.
 Driven directly by electric motor.
 High reliability inherent in low speed, low parts count and single shaft operation.
 Potentially closer in efficiency to conventional turbo-machinery than positive
displacement machines.
 Does not require ultra-high speed bearing and motor/drive technology with cost and
efficiency penalties.
 Modest tip speeds with lower noise emission pollutants and stresses.

VEHICLE MODEL AND DOWNSIZED ENGINE SIMULATION

Engine Modelling and Simulation

In the following section, a 1-d model of a NA gasoline engine was constructed, which was
used to determine the supercharger sizing in order to reach the target torque. The AVL
BOOST 1-d code was used for modelling (2). In order to meet the performance of a 1.4 L
engine, the supercharger needs to be sized in order to achieve the full load torque curve.
Therefore the target torque curve is directly taken from the 1.4 L engine. Following figure 2
gives a schematic of a 1.0 L gas engine.
Figure 2: AVL Boost Model of 1.0 L NA gasoline engine

Using the target torque data from the 1.4 L engine, supercharger sizing was done using the
above model. Assuming an initial pressure ratio and isentropic/mechanical efficiency in the
simplified turbo compressor model, the torque is calculated and the pressure ratio is adjusted
until the desired torque ratio is obtained. This was done for seven engine speed points for the
full load curve. An important assumption is that the power to drive the supercharger is not
considered to be from the engine. From the simulations the requirements for the supercharger
are calculated which are shown in the Table 1 below.

Engine Pressure Mass Isentropic Mechanical

speed [rpm] Ratio Flow [kg/s] Efficiency Efficiency
1000 1.28 0.009 0.6 0.98
1500 1.42 0.015 0.6 0.98
2000 1.45 0.021 0.6 0.98
3000 1.45 0.033 0.6 0.98
4000 1.55 0.046 0.6 0.98
5000 1.50 0.059 0.6 0.98
6000 1.47 0.071 0.6 0.98
Table 1: Supercharger requirements

From these results it was concluded that the maximum pressure ratio required is higher than
pressure ratio 1.55 deliverable by a single rotor. However, the boost level is close enough for
a TurboClaw™ based EDS to give significant improvement over the NA 1.0 L engine. The
performance of a 1.0 L gasoline engine with the EDS, has been simulated using the model.
From the requirements of the supercharger, the following compressor, shown in figure 3, with
115 mm rotor was chosen to do the further simulations.
Figure 3: Compressor map 115 mm rotor

The following figure 4 shows the achieved engine torque as result of simulation. From the
figure it can be seen that a good performance of the compressor is obtained on the low end
engine speed side from idle to approximately 3500 rpm.

130

120

110
Engine Torque [Nm]

100

90

80

1.0 L EDS Engine Torque

70
Target Torque
1.0 L NA Engine Torque
60
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000
Engine Speed [rpm]

Figure 4: Engine torque

Vehicle Performance and Fuel Economy Simulation

In the next stage, a vehicle model was constructed for a 1.0 L NA gasoline engine in a B-
segment passenger car using AVL Cruise (3). Figure 5 shows the model schematic.

Figure 5: AVL Cruise Vehicle model schematic

A second model using the same vehicle parameters and using a 1.4 L NA gasoline engine was
constructed and the fuel economy was compared with the earlier model. Following figure 6
gives the engine operating points for the homologation New European Driving Cycle (NEDC)
for the vehicle.

140
NEDC
1.0 NA Engine Torque
120
1.4 NA Engine Torque

100

80
Engine Torque [Nm]

60

40

20

0
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000

-20

-40
Engine Speed [rpm]

Figure 6: Engine load points for NEDC cycle

From the figure 6, it can be seen that in the NEDC cycle the full load characteristic of the
engine (both 1.0 L and 1.4 L) are not utilized which implies that the supercharger is not
needed in the cycle. By replacing the 1.4 L NA engine in the car with a 1.0 L engine a fuel
economy benefit of 12.4% is obtained.

Using the results obtained from the engine simulation with a 115 mm compressor, a vehicle
model was constructed for a supercharged (SC) version of the 1.0 L gas engine and
performance tests were conducted. Following figure 7 shows the maximum acceleration from
idle to maximum vehicle velocity of the three vehicle versions in each gear.

From the figure 7 it can be observed that the maximum acceleration for the lower gears in the
SC version is half that of the target where as in the higher gears it is much closer. The next
figure 8 gives the vehicle performance in terms of time to reach a threshold velocity.

4.5
1.0 L NA
1.4 L NA
4
1.0 L SC

3.5
Maximum Acceleration [m/s2]

2.5

1.5

0.5

0
1 2 3 4 5
Gear

Figure 7: Maximum acceleration in all gears

 16
1.0 L NA
1.4 L NA
14 1.0 L SC

12
Time to reach defined speed [s]

10

0
20 40 60 80 100
Velocity [kph]

Figure 8: Time to reach defined vehicle speed

Figure 8 shows that the time to reach 20 kph and 40 kph is almost same for the target and the
SC version; where as with higher vehicle speeds the difference is more visible. This is
because with higher vehicle speeds the engine operates more in the region where the SC is not
utilized i.e. post 3500 rpm. However, from the figure 9, it can be seen that the overtaking
performance of the vehicle with the downsized 1.0 L SC engine is very close to that of the 1.4
L NA engine.

30
1.0 L NA
1.4 L NA
1.0 L SC
25

20
Time [s]

15

10

0
60-100 kph in 4th gear 80-120 kph in 5th gear

Figure 9: Overtaking performance

SYSTEM CONTROL DEVELOPMENT AND ELECTRIC INTERFACE INTEGRATION

This section contains an overview of the development of the control software as rapid
prototyping system and a control environment development and simulation, followed by
hardware testing. The details of this work have been described in (4). The results of the
evaluation of the TurboClaw™ EDS are presented. This evaluation was performed in a HIL
environment. The HIL simulation consists of a real-time hardware interface connected to the
EDS. This contains an engine model which interacts with the supercharger to simulate the real
time interaction of the engine with the EDS. The figure 10 shows the model of the NA engine
with the EDS system.

Figure 10: NA engine with EDS system block diagram

This model has been compared against a model already developed in AVL Boost. For the
validation, the model was simulated in AVL Boost and Simulink using, for both, the same
throttle angle and power load as external inputs. Then the simulated manifold pressure,
throttle and cylinder air mass flow, and indicated torque were compared. The figure 11 shows
the relative error for manifold pressure. The results show that the relative error is less than 5%
for most of the operating points. However, this error increases for large engine speeds and
large loads. The increase in error in the lower engine speed region has to do with the
interpolation of the compressor maps at low flow rates.
 Manifold pressure relative error

0.2
0.25

0.2
0.15
0.15

0.1
0.1
0.05

0
70 0.05
60 6000
50 4000
40 2000
0
load (Nm) 30 0 n (rpm)

Figure 11: Manifold pressure relative error

The test rig used for HIL consists mainly on the EDS system, a throttle valve used to equate
the simulated engine mass flow model with the real EDS mass flow, and some pressure,
temperature and mass flow sensors. The HIL system is connected to this rig as shown in
figure 12.

Figure 12: Test rig layout

As can be seen in the figure 12, the hardware contains the model of the engine, the EDS
controller and the mass flow controller. The latter is used to simulate the backpressure caused
by the engine on the EDS. This is a controller setting the mass flow through the EDS
depending on the simulated engine mass flow. The main objective of the EDS system is to
deliver the desired boost when required. The EDS control loop is shown in figure 13. The
variables to be controlled are the intake manifold pressure and the boost pressure at EDS
outlet. The desired intake and boost pressures are mapped from the engine speed and desired
torque. The outputs of the controller are the engine throttle angle and the compressor speed.

Figure 13: EDS Control loop

The desired engine torque is determined depending on the accelerator pedal. The desired
torque and engine speed are used to map the desired manifold and boost pressures. The
desired compressor speed is sent to the EDS controller in the hardware simulator, which in
turn changes the EDS speed to adjust the outlet pressure.

A prototype was manufactured and a specially designed test rig was set up to conduct HIL
simulations in order to test and verify the developed control strategy. Figure 14 shows the
performance of the controller and compressor prototype in the HIL simulation. In the
simulation, the engine speed and the accelerator pedal are the variables input by the user. The
figure shows that for different engine speeds and accelerator pedal values, the desired boost
pressure changes in order to deliver the required torque. As can be seen, the measured boost
pressure follows the desired boost pressure accurately. Also the boost control is only active
for accelerator pedal values above 35%. When the boost control is active the mass flow
controller is active, since the mass flow in the rig is almost zero when the compressor is not
operated.
 Reference and measured boost presure Accelerator pedal and engine torque
130 1 100
125 80
0.8
120
60
115 0.6
kPa

Nm
(-)
40
110 0.4
20
105 Eng. torque
Ref. P.
0.2 0
100 Eng. P. Acc. pedal
95 0 -20
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500

4
x 10 Compressor and engine speed Engine and rig mass flow
4 2500 25
Comp. mass flow
20 Engine mass flow
3 2000
Comp. speed
15

Kg/s
rpm

rpm
2 1500
10
Engine speed
1 1000
5

0 500 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
time (s) time (s)

Figure 14: Transient response of the system

CONCLUSIONS

This paper presents the result of EDS using patented TurboClaw™ technology for engine
downsizing application. The EDS system has the benefit of reduced fuel consumption
required for passenger vehicle propulsion whilst enhancing vehicle performance when
compared with vehicles with NA engine. The results show that significant fuel economy
benefit can be achieved by a downsized 1.0 L NA engine as compared to the original 1.4 L
NA on a B-segment vehicle while achieving similar vehicle performance levels when EDS is
applied. Other possibilities such as using the system in combination with a turbocharger have
been briefly investigated and further work needs to be done to evaluate the benefit and
suitability of EDS in these environments.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Authors wish to thank the Technology Strategy Board for their support in the project.

REFERENCES

(1) Patent No “GB2366333B”, “PCT/GB/2004/003752”, “P47632GB”

(2) AVL Boost User’s Guide, Edition 07/2009
(3) AVL Cruise User’s Guide, Edition 07/2009
(4) Villegas, J. et al. (2011) “Real-time Engine Modelling for Engine Downsizing Using
an Electric Supercharger” EAEC 2011 (accepted)

CONTACT

Aditya Dhand, <aditya.dhand@avl.com>

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