International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering and Interdisciplinary Developments [ICRAMID - 2014]

Analysis of Incylinder Pressure and Temperature

Variation in a Four- Stroke S. I. Engine using
Wiebes Combustion Model
Vijayashree*

Tamil Porai P

Mahalakshmi N V

Internal Combustion Engines Division, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Anna University, Chennai
600 025, India
vijaysri@iitm.ac.in, tporai@annauniv.edu, nvmlakshmi@annauniv.edu

Ganesan V*

Internal Combustion Engines Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of

Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India
*Corresponding author vganesan@iitm.ac.in
Abstract This paper presents the modeling of incylinder pressure variation of a four-stroke single
cylinder spark ignition engine. It uses instantaneous
properties of working fluid, viz., gasoline to calculate
heat release rates, needed to quantify combustion
development.
Cylinder pressure variation with
respect to either volume or crank angle gives
valuable information about the combustion process.
The analysis of the pressure volume or pressuretheta data of a engine cycle is a classical tool for
engine studies. This paper aims at demonstrating the
modeling of pressure variation as a function of crank
angle as well as volume with the help of MATLAB
program developed for this purpose. Towards this
end, Woschni heat release model is used for the
combustion process. The important parameter, viz.,
peak pressure for different compression ratios are
used in the analysis. Predicted results are compared
with experimental values obtained for a typical
compression ratio of 8.3.

engine monitoring systems. Researchers have pursued

various approaches to obtain the desired cylinder
pressure directly or indirectly. However, these
approaches vary in cost, reliability, robustness, accuracy
and convenience. In this paper the estimation of cylinder
pressures and combustion heat releases of a single
cylinder SI engine are predicted using thermodynamic
analysis and the results are compared with experimental
values.
II. HEAT RELEASE RATE
Cylinder pressure built by combustion process,
is affected by the gas flows, heat transfer, change in
volume of combustion chamber and the chemical
composition of the fuel. Hence it is necessary to relate
each term to measure the in-cylinder pressure changes
and then combine them to quantify the combustion
effects to examine the combustion process.

Keywords: incylinder pressure, Woshini heat release

model, spark-ignition engine
I. INTRODUCTION
Modeling of internal combustion engines have
long been established as an effective tool for studying
engine performance. It greatly contributes to evaluation
and new developments. In this connection
thermodynamic models of the real engine cycle have
served as effective tools for the analysis of engine
performance and also able to reveal the sensitivity to
various operating factors [1-4]. Cylinder pressure
variation is an important parameter in engine
combustion analysis or engine diagnosis. In many
applications, cylinder pressure is critical for control or

Fig.1 Control volume in combustion chamber

The heat released by combustion of fuel in a

control volume using first law of thermodynamics
is change in chemical energy released from
where
the fuel, dU is the change in internal energy of the mass
in control volume,
is the heat losses to the cylinder
wall across the control volume boundary and dW the
elementary work (Fig.1).

ISBN 978-93-80609-17-1
1084

International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering and Interdisciplinary Developments [ICRAMID - 2014]

dmht and dmcr represent the changes in the

enthalpy due to flow of the mass out and into the control
volume. When the fluid flow out of the control volume
into the crevices dmht >0. The gas is trapped in crevices
until maximum pressure, and when the gas returns to the
control volume dmht < 0 . It represents the non-return
leak flow (blowby) from control volume to engine
crankcase. It is evaluated at cylinder conditions (dmcr
>0) or at crevice conditions (dmcr >0). The change of the
mass in control volume is given by
III. HEAT TRANSFER MODELLING
Heat transfer from the working gas to the
cylinder walls and piston can be modelled using either:
1) a constant heat transfer coefficient; or
2) the model by Woschni [2].
When a constant heat transfer coefficient is
used, two different heat transfer values should be set:
one for the unburned zone (hcu), and the other for the
burned zone (hcb). If the Woschni model is used, hcu
and hcb is set to values close to unity because they are
treated as weighting factors for the model. These values
can be tuned as necessary to improve agreement with
experimental measurements.
The air-fuel mixture drawn into engine cylinder
under atmospheric pressure and temperature conditions
are filled into engine cylinder with the residual gas left
inside the cylinder from previous cycle and pressure and
temperature of the last mixture is changed. First
thermodynamic properties of this mixture are
determined. In combustion model, cylinder volume is
supposed as composed of three regions which are
burned region, burning region, unburned region
and compression, combustion and expansion processes
are calculated with the help of thermodynamic relations.
The gas pressure and temperature and the composition of
combustion products are calculated step by step using
thermodynamic equations. The equations are solved with
Newton Raphson iteration method until the temperature
values approaching each other with 1K tolerance at the
end of calculating step of compression and expansion
processes.
IV. WIEBE FUNCTION
A functional form often used to represent the
mass fraction burned versus crank angle is the Wiebe
Function:
1

exp

where is the crank angle, 0 is the angle where the start

of combustion occurs, is the total combustion
duration and and m are adjustable parameters. In this

study actual mass fraction burned curves have been fitted

with = 5 and m = 2 which are used by most of the
researchers.
Jonathan Borg and Alex Alkidas [6] have
employed Wiebe function to simulate the fuel burning in
internal combustion engines. They have examined the
various forms of the Wiebe functions and presented a
methodology that optimizes the Wiebe parameters for
simultaneously best fit of the cumulative heat release
and the rate of heat release histories. The accuracy of the
results of the Wiebe function when solving for two
parameters and for four parameters had been compared;
the former is done in closed form, whereas the latter is
done by using an optimization routine. The latter
methodology was applied for the simulation of
combustion in spark-ignition engines under normal and
knocking conditions. For the knocking cycles, a linear
weighted combination of two Wiebe functions, one
enabling the modelling of the flame-propagation
combustion and the other that of the auto-ignition
combustion was found to give excellent results.
V. WOSCHNIS CORRELATION
.

.
.
.

P is the instantaneous pressure, in bar. C0 = 110-130. C1

and C2 are given in Table 1.
TABLE 1
C1 AND C2 COEFFICIENTS FOR WOSCHNIS CORRELATION

Phase
Intake-Exhaust
Compression
Combustion-Expansion

C1 [-]
6.18
2.28
2.28

C2 [m/s.K]
0
0
3.24 x 10-3

VI. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

The photographic details of the experimental
setup are shown in Fig.2. The test setup with the
instrumentation can be seen in Fig.2.
VII. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Figure 3 shows the variation of pressure vs
crank angle for the engine under consideration run at
4000 rpm with chemically correct mixture. As can be
seen that there is a reasonably good agreement between
predicted and measured values. However, the peak
pressure is little over predicted. This is to be expected
because in Wiebes function, the and m are not tuned

ISBN 978-93-80609-17-1
1085

International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering and Interdisciplinary Developments [ICRAMID - 2014]

Fig.1 Photographs of the experimental setup

for this particular engine. As it is difficult to change the

compression ratio in an actual engine, the effect of
compression ratio is studied by simulation. This effect is
clearly depicted in Fig.3(b).
As can be noticed, when compression ratio
increased from 7.3 to 8.3, the peak pressure increases
from 58.56 kPa to 66.9 kPa. This to say that when
compression ratio increased by 13.7%, the peak pressure
increases by 14.2%. The reverse trend is also similar.
Therefore, it can be clearly concluded that compression
ratio has a predominant effect of the peak pressure and
thereby the performance of the engine.
It is the endeavour of the designer not only to
get the maximum pressure but also it should occur
between 12 and 160 after crank angle.

Thus the p- variation will clearly illustrate

whether the engine is under good working condition.
This is the advantage in analyzing the p- variation of
cylinder pressure. As far as the present engine is
concerned it could be seen that the peak pressure occurs
at 376.4 crank angle degrees. Therefore, the engine can
be considered to be working in healthy condition.
Figure 4 shows the variation of temperature with
crank angle. It can be seen that the peak temperature is
reasonably well predicted. This is due to the fact that it is
due to appropriate heat release model. Further, the
predicted results match reasonably well in the entire
cycle. Comparison of p-V variation is shown in Fig. 5.

(b)

(a)

Fig.2 Pressure-crank angle variation for different compression ratios

ISBN 978-93-80609-17-1
1086

International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering and Interdisciplinary Developments [ICRAMID - 2014]

Fig.4 Temperature-crank angle variation for different compression ratios

Based on the simulation study on the basis of

quasi one dimensional thermodynamic modelling it can
be concluded that such simple modeling can provide first
cut results in the development and in deciding best
possible operating conditions to study the health of the
engine. Further, it gives confidence to study the
performance of the engines in terms of p-V diagrams,
temperatures and p-theta curves for various throttle
positions for standard piston motion.
IX. REFERENCES

[1] V. Ganesan. Computer Simulation Of SparkIgnition Engine Processes Universities Press, 1996

[2] C.D. Rakopoulos and E.G. Giakoumis Second law

Fig.3 Pressure-volume diagram compression ratio 8.3

VIII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the simulated model using Matlab
programming with Wiebe function as combustion model
is predicted and validated with the experimental data.
The simulated result are found to be in reasonably good
agreement with the experiment. The main purpose of
this paper is to study the pressure-crank angle diagram
for better performance of the engine by applying a
suitable combustion model and incorporate heat transfer
model with appropriate heat transfer coefficients this is
achieved. The essential challenges in developing this
procedure are the control of the start of combustion, and
proper selection of inlet valve open and close, exhaust
valve open and close and injection duration.

[3]
[4]

[5]
[6]

ISBN 978-93-80609-17-1
1087

analyses applied to internal combustion engines

operation, Progress in Energy and Combustion
Science, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 2-47, 2006.
M.J. Moran and H.N. Shapiro. Fundamentals of
Engg Thermodynamics, Wiley, New York, 2000
J.H. Horlock and D.EWinterbone The Thermodynamics and Gas Dynamics of Internal
Combustion Engines, Vol. II, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1986.
G. Woshini, A Universally Applicable Equation
for Instantaneous Heat Transfer coefficient in
lntemal Combustion Engine", SAE Paper 670931
M. Jonathan Borg and Alex C Alkidas, On the
application of Wiebe functions to simulate normal
and knocking spark-ignition combustion, Int. J. of
Vehicle Design, 2009 Vol.49, No.1/2/3, pp.52 69