Cylinder deactivation technology has been demonstrated as a durable and reliable means to achieve improved fuel economy in spark ignited gasoline engines. Notable current production systems include GM's Active Fuel Management (AFM) [2] and Chrysler's Multi-Displacement System (MDS) [3], both deployed on production V8 engines. Recently increased Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards in the US and CO 2 targets in Europe have driven application of cylinder deactivation to smaller displacement and lower cylinder count engines. This can be seen with Volkswagen's application of Active Cylinder Technology (ACT) in its new 1.4L turbo GDi engine in 2013.Cylinder deactivation achieves fuel economy improvement by operating a reduced number of cylinders at a higher operating load per cylinder to produce the same engine torque output. These systems are examples of two-mode deactivation where either full cylinder count or half cylinder count is provided, V8 or V4 mode and L4 or L2 mode as shown in Figure 1. Such systems are even firing, which means a skipped cylinder event follows a firing cylinder and the firing sequence or pattern is completed with each engine cycle.
ABSTRACTCylinder deactivation is a technology seeing increased automotive deployment in light of more demanding fuel economy and emissions requirements. Examples of current production systems include GM's Active Fuel Management and Chrysler's Multi-Displacement System, both of which provide one fixed level of deactivation. Dynamic Skip Fire (DSF), in which the number of fired cylinders is continuously varied to match the torque demand, offers significantly increased fuel savings over a wider operating range than the current production systems. One of the biggest challenges in implementing cylinder deactivation is developing strategies to provide acceptable Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH); this paper discusses those challenges and the methodologies developed. This work covers theoretical root causes; proposed metrics to quantify the NVH level; algorithmic and physical mitigation methods; and both subjective and objective evaluation results.
CITATION:Serrano, J., Routledge, G., Lo, N., Shost, M. et al., "Methods of Evaluating and Mitigating NVH when Operating an Engine in Dynamic Skip Fire," SAE Int. J. Engines 7(3):2014,