Many of the engine technologies used in future construction machines will be targeted towards reduced fuel consumption and increased power density. Fuel consumption forms a major component of owning and operating costs, as do both reliability and durability. Reduced fuel consumption (or CO2) is strongly related to air system performance, combustion and frictional loss in the engine. These factors will be main focus areas during this project as they are key enablers for engine downsizing with its commensurate fuel savings. ICT will form a fundamental part of the design of these future CO2-reduced powerplants. In addition to enabling the deployment of promising technologies across a wide engine and machine range, simulation tools will be harnessed to optimise performance. This project, using both simulation tools and real world validation, will realise exploitable outputs in the form of: • More accurate prediction of CO2 performance for machines on specific customer worksites; • Improved operator feedback in virtual environments which are “driven” by the system simulation tool • Rapid replication of CO2-reduction technologies across the world widest construction machine range • Standardised meta-tagged construction machine performance data • Improved turbocharger durability • A robust, widely deployable data mining, error-estimation and optimisation framework • New optimisation algorithms applied to parameter identification in model development.

Heavy duty vehicles account for approximately 8% of UK transport CO2 production. A fully-electric, battery-powered heavy duty vehicle is hard to envisage and so the challenge for the HD industry is one of efficiency gains, whether to the engine or to the vehicle-plus-drivetrain (including hybrids). One way of improving diesel engine efficiency is by increasing its peak cylinder pressure capability thereby allowing more advanced injection timing. The Ultra-High Peak Cylinder Pressure Heavy Duty Diesel Engine programme is developing, harmonising and applying advanced simulation tools to design and manufacture an engine with 30% up-rated cylinder pressure capability. Additionally, novel multidisciplinary optimisation tools are being harnessed to ensure near optimal functionality of the end product, and to help solve this complex design-for-manufacture problem. As outcomes of this proposed programme, the simulation-driven processes and production of the demonstration engines will represent a significant improvement over the current state in terms of both time and cost. These step changes in performance and development costs are complemented by the reduced CO2 of between 2 - 8% per engine that will be realised during the functional life of the product.