Internal combustion engine analysis using EngineEnvelope (EE)

Many common industrial activities, like energy production, people and goods transportation, heavily rely on internal combustion engines’ operations. The capabilities of reducing the total cost of operation and maximizing the uptime of these machines are a very important topic for the their owner and much energy has to be put on the purpose. In many cases, scheduled maintenance programs are adopted. After a defined amount of time, decided by the engine producer, parts are overhauled and updated regardless of the real usage level and damage. Instead, it is clear that being able to substitute only the damaged parts, at due time, will reduce the engine ownership and maintenance costs. While on the market several maintenance tools dedicated to the on-line monitoring of the thermodynamic aspects (mixture characteristics, exhausts analysis, miss-firing) are present, none are available for the evaluation of the kinematics links problems. The paper propose a novel technique, named EngineEnvelope (EE), focused on the online monitoring of the mechanical potential issues like bolt looseness, pistons clearance and bearings damages. The paper describe the monitoring function, its capabilities of detecting damages on real data acquired on a two strokes, single cylinder engine.