Experimental Design and Modelling of Automated 4-Cylinder Engine Injector

The global emission regulations and fossil fuel pollution control have necessitated the need to study the effect of injector fuel splitting time and flow rate on engine performance. To achieve this, an automated prototyped 4-cylinder injector engine was developed to replicate the real-time activities of the injector system in the internal combustion (IC) engine. Arduino Nano open-source platform was used to integrate the various component parts such as the fuel injector, fuel tank, submersible fuel pump injector rail, transparent plastic chamber, flexible hose, Engine Control Unit (ECU), connecting wires, frame, Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), switch button, relay module, current sensor, potentiometer, Arduino nano, and pressure sensor that were used for the design experiment. Programmable circuit board microcontroller, Arduino (Integrated Development Environment) IDE, and C++ coding language were used to achieve the smart regulations of the injector operation system to replicate the real-time situation when the engine is running. This was achieved by incorporating Arduino microcontroller ATMEGA328, C++, and Arduino IDE software. The Arduino programming initiates the injection system and measures the injection output parameters. The system was designed to vary the splitting time delay between the four injectors and to measure the flow rate of the fuel injected. The experimental study showed that at a very high splitting time delay, the amount of fuel injected is more than the fuel injected at a relatively low splitting time delay with an average flow rate of 4.36 l/min at 50 microseconds and 0.02 l/min at 500 microseconds for high and low splitting time, respectively. This study will help the stakeholders in the automotive industry to virtualize the invisible situation of the fuel injector in real-time performance in the engine.

Keywords: Arduino Nano, Automation, Fuel injection, Microcontroller, Potentiometer