In particular, Dr. Willems and his colleagues used the package during the development of the EcoBlue’s mirror-image intake ports. In a first for Ford, the symmetrical design of the integrated inlet manifold causes the air going to cylinders one and two to swirl clockwise, while the supply to cylinders three and four swirls anti-clockwise.

The two sets of ports are essentially mirror images of each other. When you have a lot of variation between the airflow you’re always focusing on getting the weakest cylinder to work properly, which means the others are being held back. Our mirrored port design improves the distribution of air between the cylinders, which reduces emissions and fuel consumption.

—Dr. Willems

This contributes to the EcoBlue’s 13% reduction in fuel economy compared to its predecessor, as well as significant reductions in tailpipe emissions.

CFD studies are a powerful tool in engine development, but they have traditionally been a time-consuming and complex process. CONVERGE, however, reduces the amount of manual input required by automating the meshing process carried out before the simulation.

CONVERGE uses a function known as Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) to regenerate the grid at each time-step, re-structuring it to accommodate changes in geometry or activity. That means that events such as valve opening and piston motion can be modeled without stretching or skewing the mesh, which would incur so-called deformation errors.

The AMR function is fully coupled with the flow and chemistry solvers, so it can automatically vary the mesh density across the model. By applying a denser mesh in more critical areas but reducing the cell count elsewhere it can dramatically improve the speed-to-accuracy ratio of the simulation.

The Ford engineers are now pressing ahead with development of the EcoBlue range, which will shortly expand to include passenger car variants.