Evaluation time Le Dakar Rally.
The rally team is back on home soil and I get the story from the team first hand on how things went.
Engine en ECU system seem to be very fail save on hi ambient temp and altitude up to 4700 meter above sea level where you get a bout 60Kpa ambient pressure.
Even a cold start on 4300 meter altitude did not be any challenge as the older build Paccar Euro 5 engines or Tier4 engines stared up like a prostock diesel with loads of white smoke puffing and barking for the next 5 minutes.
Full power in the sand dunes with close to 50 degrees C, no problems there as well running no more than 760 degrees C EGT so perfect there as well.
Fuel consumption is up to 60 litters less compared to the same semi rally truck set-up with the Euro 5 engine on a 800Km rally stage so this could be the explanation on why the Euro 6 engine can endure more extremes as I need less cooling on things as less fuel consumption/same power output usually means less heat load on exhaust and cooling system.
Need a bit more low end power. This will be a challenge as I’m serious out of hi pressure fuelpump capacity so need to look into options on what there from OE not eating away the cam lopes for the fuelpumps as changing a cam during a rally is close to mission impossible.
On the turbo part the team even want to look into VGT or VNT turbo so maybe start using the bigger core BorgWarner S430V as an option with TI compressor wheel but these turbo are expensive and hi EGT must be avoided same as running them in overspeed and so on so it dos make things more complicated to run them under the most extreme conditions and as far non of the factory teams use them so I think we have to put some effort in building some hybrid turbo configurations see what woks best on a conventional turbo set-up.
Over the last week I have been working hard for the US and Canadian marked as to Kpa and degrees centigrade they like PSI and Fahrenheit a lot better so now this option is there.
Also try to make the fuel calculation a lot easer by stepping away from the virtual engine fuel set-up where you able to dial in things like engine displacement and cylinders and so on but as so many side step from a OE ECU system they like injection to crank angle for PD engines a lot better so this option is there for engines like
CAT C12 up to C18 an a load of other engines using pump injection units.
For commonrail I want to implement volume per stroke but the problem could be that you need a accurate flowmap of the injector as we now use a very good correction method to compensate for fuel pressure differences and your unable to run this thing off the chard as well dialling in some stupid numbers on fuel wanted so I wonder what’s best getting e-mail why are we not getting more fuel of why is my rail pressure dropping hard making no power and only black smoke.
After a load of e-mail I get. As for ECU or ECM system. It’s only as good as the tune inside the ECU. And engine management system dos not make more power on it self. It’s all a bout the engine set-up that makes this possible if your not hitting the limits given by the ECU or ECM system that is. Most fall short on hi RPM not able to make a mapping just increasing the max RPM limit and so on.
Benefits of using an aftermarket ECU system could be having more control on this and in our case you will have full aces on things so making endless changes and even writing your own code is possible.
Downside on things is with this almost unlimited options you need to know what your doing as for most things we do not set borders so in general more freedom also means more responsibilities and know how on things but yes I’m trying to simplify things and good suggestions are always welcome....