Publisher's Synopsis
Finding appropriate documents on diesel engine general operation, calibration and bench activities is a very difficult task. This book is trying to close that gap, providing a manual of activities and procedures, and a general overview of the technology, for anyone starting from zero. If you are an expert on diesel engines, with a lot of experience and years working in calibration environments, you will possibly find the content of these pages quite obvious, or you might even -why not?- disagree with some of my arguments and suggestions. If you are an engineer who's new to this world, you have been contracted by an automotive company and will work on diesel engines, or you are simply an engineer working in the automotive industry, and you would like to increase this specific knowledge area -diesel engine calibration and operation- this is a book that will definitely help you. It is structured to give you insight into the engine, the bench, and the combustion process, to then focus on some of the standard calibration activities performed at a test bench, with hints on the main points, possible problems, and expected results. It is all mixed together with a bit of theory and some formulas, but these are limited to the minimum necessary. There are plenty of highly theoretical articles available to deepen into mathematics and physics around diesel combustion, but that is not the purpose here. The vision is that this book may be found, someday, in the technical libraries of diesel engine departments and in the libraries of diesel engine engineers, and of course in the hands of anyone who's willing to improve his or her knowledge on calibration procedures or simply to get to better understand how a diesel engine works and how bench technical personnel work with them. To improve the learning curve and the academic value, you will find plenty of real examples (all with false numbers and without an indication of the origin of the data, of course), and many images, some of which can be found online without much effort. Finally, people nowadays say that the remaining life of the diesel engine is short. Nonetheless, their advantages in terms of efficiency and utilization cost are so superior to their gasoline or hybrid counterparts as to suggest many miles still await them in their current form or in other, more exotic shapes.
