The piston of a heavy-duty single-cylinder research engine was instrumented with 11 fast-response surface thermocouples, and a commercial wireless telemetry system was used to transmit the signals from the moving piston. The raw thermocouple data were processed using an inverse heat conduction method that included Tikhonov regularization to recover transient heat flux. By applying symmetry, the data were compiled to provide time-resolved spatial maps of the piston heat flux and surface temperature. A detailed comparison was made between conventional diesel combustion and reactivity-controlled compression ignition combustion operations at matched conditions of load, speed, boost pressure, and combustion phasing. The integrated piston heat transfer was found to be 24% lower, and the mean surface temperature was 25 °C lower for reactivity-controlled compression ignition operation as compared to conventional diesel combustion, in spite of the higher peak heat release rate. Lower integrated piston heat transfer for reactivity-controlled compression ignition was found over all the operating conditions tested. The results showed that increasing speed decreased the integrated heat transfer for conventional diesel combustion and reactivity-controlled compression ignition. The effect of the start of injection timing was found to strongly influence conventional diesel combustion heat flux, but had a negligible effect on reactivity-controlled compression ignition heat flux, even in the limit of near top dead center high-reactivity fuel injection timings. These results suggest that the role of the high-reactivity fuel injection does not significantly affect the thermal environment even though it is important for controlling the ignition timing and heat release rate shape. The integrated heat transfer and the dynamic surface heat flux were found to be insensitive to changes in boost pressure for both conventional diesel combustion and reactivity-controlled compression ignition. However, for reactivity-controlled compression ignition, the mean surface temperature increased with changes in boost suggesting that equivalence ratio affects steady-state heat transfer.

Heat flux measurements were performed in an air-cooled utility engine using a fast-response coaxial-type surface thermocouple. The surface heat flux was calculated using both analytical and numerical models. The heat flux was found to be a strong function of engine load. The peak heat flux and initial heat flux rise rate increase with engine load. The measured heat flux data were used to estimate a global heat transfer rate, and this was compared with the heat transfer rate calculated by a single-zone heat release analysis. The measured values of heat transfer were higher than the calculated values largely because of the lack of spatial averaging. The high load data showed an unexplainable negative heat flux during the expansion stroke while the gas temperature was still high. A 1D and 2D finite difference numerical model utilizing an adaptive timestep Crank-Nicholson (CN) integration routine was developed to investigate the surface temperature measurement. Applying the measured surface temperature profile to the 1D model, the resultant surface heat flux showed excellent agreement with the analytical inversion solution and captured the reversal of the energy flow back into the cylinder during the expansion stroke. The 2D numerical model was developed to observe transient lateral conduction effects within the probe and incorporated the various materials used in the construction and assembly of the heat flux sensor. The resulting average heat flux profile for the test case is shown to be slightly higher in peak and longer in duration when compared with the results from the 1D analytical inversion, and this is attributed to contributions from the high thermal diffusivity constituents in the sensor. Furthermore, the negative heat flux at high load was not eliminated suggesting that factors other than lateral conduction may be affecting the measurement accuracy.

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