Engineering research center to develop an ethanol engine with better performance

Project was selected in a call launched by FAPESP and Peugeot Citröen.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – FAPESP and Peugeot Citroën approved a proposal for the creation of a Research and Engineering Center focused on the development of biofuel-powered combustion engines.

The center will bring together researchers at the Mechanical Engineering School of the University of Campinas (Unicamp), the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, the Mauá Institute of Technology and the Aeronautics Technology Institute (ITA), who will develop a joint research project focused on creating an ethanol motor that performs better than those developed in recent decades in Brazil.

The project was selected in a call for proposals launched by FAPESP and Peugeot Citroën do Brasil Automóveis (PCBA).

FAPESP and Peugeot Citroën do Brasil Automóveis will fund the center for four years under a contract that is renewable for another six years. The objective of the center will be to develop internal combustion engines that are adapted to or developed specifically for biofuels.

An international committee composed of researchers at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech), the Turin Polytechnic Institute, Cambridge University (UK), Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany) and University College London (UK) will assist in the project.

Among the themes to be addressed are new configurations for motors powered by various types of biofuels – including motors for use in hybrid vehicles, to achieve lower consumption and gas emissions – and the effects and economic feasibility of biofuel use.

“In the next four years, we intend to develop the concept for a motor dedicated exclusively to ethanol that has greater power and is more efficient than flex fuel motors today,” commented Waldyr Luiz Ribeiro Gallo, a faculty member of Unicamp’s Mechanical Engineering School and the project coordinator.

The Engineering Research Center will not have a building in which all of the researchers involved in the project will work together, explained Gallo. “The research lines will be spread among the participating institutions. Our major challenge will be coordinating the activities of these different groups of researchers.”

According to the researcher, the idea is for the initial project to bring together a group of researchers who specialize in various aspects of automotive engineering. The goal, however, is for the center to attract new researchers, new projects and more sponsors to diversify its funding sources and make the center self sustaining.

“Over time, we intend for the center to have new funding sources beyond FAPESP and PCBA – new projects, new researchers – to grow and expand its limits,” said Gallo.

“The approval of the proposal inaugurates a model for an engineering research center that associates the characteristics of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (CEPID) with the FAPESP Research Partnership for Technological Innovation, PITE,” affirmed Carlos Henrique de Brito de Cruz, the Scientific Director of FAPESP.

The agreement forged between FAPESP and PCBA for the construction of the Engineering Research Center was the first such agreement between a research foundation in Brazil and the Brazilian subsidiary of the French automaker.

“We already had direct partnerships with Brazilian universities but none with a research foundation like FAPESP intermediating this relationship,” commented Flávio Gomes Dias, the Innovation Coordinator of PCBA.

“This gave us a greater sense of security about choosing a research project to fund without making a mistake because we saw that FAPESP’s peer reviewers are world-renowned researchers in studies on combustion engines,” he noted.

The initiative to fund the project in Brazil followed a decision made at the automaker’s headquarters to make the Brazilian subsidiary the hub of research competence in the area of biofuels, due to Brazil’s expertise in this field. Since then, all the company’s global resources for this purpose have been earmarked for Brazil to allow the local subsidiary to coordinate projects in the area.

Through the project, researchers intend to test the concept of an entirely ethanol-burning engine. “We believe that a motor dedicated totally to ethanol could have substantially greater performance and efficiency than flex fuel,” said Gallo.

According to Gallo, one of the limitations of the flex fuel motor is that it has to function equally on ethanol and gasoline. The fuels have significant differences in, for example, their detonation resistance (the ability to be compressed at high temperatures in a combustion chamber).

Because of this limitation, a flex fuel motor cannot be optimized to run on ethanol because this would diminish its performance and efficiency when powered by gas and vice versa. According to Gallo, although the efficiency of flex fuel motors has improved in recent years due to advances in electronics, flex fuel motors have still not been optimized for ethanol.

“It is not optimal for gasoline or ethanol. Technically, it is a compromise solution,” he said, referring to the flex fuel motor having been developed as a way to allow the consumer to choose between the two fuel options.

New technologies

To develop a new ethanol engine, researchers will evaluate and eventually incorporate recent technological advances in automotive engineering.

These innovations will make it possible to develop new motors that achieve much better performance than those used at the beginning of the 1980s – when automakers operating in Brazil began to manufacture cars entirely powered by ethanol.

“The motors of that time had carburetors and needed special calibration to reduce pollutant emissions,” said Gallo. “Today, they no longer have carburetors; they have catalytic converters and use electronic resources to control operation parameters that have advanced significantly since the last ethanol motors were released on the Brazilian market.”

Some of the new technologies that will be analyzed in the conceptual development of new and advanced ethanol motors are the variable valve timing (which controls the timing of motor valves) and the direct injection of ethanol into the combustion chamber, rather than fuel injection in the collector.

The latter technique is considered one of the most promising to improve the efficiency of ethanol-powered motors. “One of the project’s objectives will be to advance the knowledge of fuel injection and ethanol combustion mechanisms, about which there have been few studies,” said Gallo.

“In the first phase, we will not develop and build a new ethanol motor but will conduct concept tests on the technological possibilities, to evaluate where we can advance,” he affirmed. To this end, the teams at the four research institutions involved in the project will study a specific question related to ethanol motors.

The ITA’s group of researchers and that of the USP’s Polytechnic School, for example, will explore aspects of the basic phenomenology of combustion. The researchers at the Mauá Institute of Technology will conduct modified motor studies. For their part, the Unicamp researchers will work on thermodynamic simulation and concept development, among other topics.

Research hub in biofuels

“The exceptional possibilities for developing any type of biofuel and the history with ethanol and flex fuel motors position Brazil as a natural hub for research in this area,” said François Sigot, the Research, Development and Design Director for Latin America at PSA Peugeot Citroën.

“FAPESP and PCBA have created a partnership that is essential to fulfilling FAPESP’s objectives to develop science and technology in São Paulo State and reflects the company’s dedication to the development of research and technology in the country. PCBA mobilized specialists of the highest caliber in the analysis phase, demonstrating the company’s capacity and its clear objectives in research and development,” said Brito Cruz.