Book Description

At the very beginning of my career, I found myself "thrown to the lions." As a recent graduate and at my first job as a test-bench calibration engineer, I was asked to perform activities that were alien to me, and this made me feel quite lost, incapable of proving my value and making my contribution to my department and the company. This situation lasted for several months and converged slowly, thanks to the help of my colleagues and the few sparse files and books I could get my hands on. Finding appropriate documents on diesel engine calibration and bench activities proved to be a very difficult task. This book is trying to close that gap, providing a manual of activities and procedures 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, and then to 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. My small 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. People nowadays say that the remaining life of the diesel engine is short. I tend to disagree. Their advantages in terms of efficiency and utilization cost are so superior to their gasoline counterparts as to suggest many miles still await them in their current form or in other, more exotic shapes.