Combustion noise level assessment in direct injection Diesel engines by means of in-cylinder pressure components

The low consumption achievable with Diesel engines and the subsequent reduction of CO2 emissions, together with the new technologies allowing to meet present and future legislation for pollutant emission reduction, make them attractive from an environmental viewpoint. However, current and future Diesel concepts are intrinsically noisy, and thus in the past few years, combustion noise was considered as an additional factor in engine development alongside performance, emissions and driveability. Otherwise, due to this negative issue intrinsic to Diesel combustion, end- users could be reluctant to drive Diesel- powered vehicles and their potential for environment preservation could thus be lost or underused. Evaluation procedures are then required, both for noise level and sound quality, that may be integrated into the global engine development process, avoiding the need to resort to long and expensive acoustic tests. In this paper, such a procedure, based on the noise source diagnostic through the definition of suitable components extracted from in- cylinder pressure, is proposed and validated. An innovative decomposition of the in- cylinder pressure signal is used to obtain such components, so that features associated with the excitation inside the cylinder may be properly identified. These combustion components, significant of the rate of heat release in the cylinder and the resonance in the combustion chamber, may be correlated with the overall noise level. A prediction of the radiated engine noise level more accurate than that obtained from the classical 'block attenuation' approach is achieved, while combustion process features related to the resulting noise level can be identified and thus corrective actions may be proposed.