615Advanced diesel valvetrain system design
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whole engine because only some of the cylinders are ring; and (3) possible
piston ring friction power reduction due to decreased cylinder pressure in
the deactivated cylinders.
Variable engine displacement is a very attractive feature for advanced
diesel engines due to its advantages of fuel economy at part load. On the
other hand, design challenges in engine balance and NVH exist for cylinder
deactivation due to its deviated excitation forces in the cylinders compared
to those designed for the non-deactivation operation. Cylinder deactivation is
normally used in the engines that have an even number of cylinders since the
engine can operate in ring with half of its cylinders while retaining an even
ring interval. It is usually used in six or more cylinders in order to avoid
excessively high vibration. For example, in a V8 engine with the ring order
1–5–2–6–4–8–3–7, either the cylinders 1, 2, 3, and 4 or the cylinders 5, 6, 7,
and 8 can be deactivated to fulll the requirement of a constant ring interval
of 180° crank angle. The constant ring interval is achieved by deactivating
the two inner cylinders on one bank of the engine and the two outer cylinders
on the other bank. In general, from the vibration perspective, V8, V10 or V12
engines are more suitable for cylinder deactivation than V6 or I4 engines.
Cylinder deactivation has been used in limited production engines since
the 1980s (e.g., General Motor’s 1981 Cadillac Eldorado V8 gasoline engine
with two- and four-cylinder deactivation, denoted as V8–6–4; Mitsubishi’s
Orion-MD engine as presented by Fukui et al., 1983; and Mitsubishi’s two-
cylinder deactivation in an 1.6 liter I4 gasoline engine in 1992).
Almost all the published work on cylinder deactivation was conducted
on the gasoline engine. Cylinder deactivation performance was investigated
by Bates et al. (1978), Watanabe and Fukutani (1982), Dresner and Barkan
(1989a, 1989b), Hatano et al. (1993), Sandford et al. (1998), Leone and
Pozar (2001), and Douglas et al. (2005). The research conducted by Leone
and Pozar (2001) provides an excellent comprehensive summary on cylinder
deactivation for gasoline engines. The NVH of cylinder deactivation is
discussed by Falkowski et al. (2004), Lee and Rahbar (2005), and Bemman
et al. (2005). The details of design and transient controls are introduced by
Bates et al. (1978), Kreuter et al. (2001), Zheng (2001), Falkowski et al.
(2004), Stabinsky et al. (2007), and Rebbert et al. (2008). Only Watanabe
and Fukutani (1982) included a brief description of the testing results of
cylinder deactivation for a naturally aspirated diesel engine in their study.
9.9.2 Mechanisms and performance benefits of cylinder
deactivation
Inuential factors of cylinder deactivation benets
The performance benets and issues of cylinder deactivation compared to
the non-deactivation operation are measured primarily by BSFC, drivability,
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