A Medical-inspired Rapid Determination Of Engine Oil Consumption For Automobiles

Engine works as the heart of an automobile and the effective circulation of engine oil is crucial to the engine life and efficacy.Abnormal operating conditions of engines often result in an excess leakage of engine oil into the combustion chamber,leading to a so-called"engine oil burning"phenomenon.Thus,the engine oil consumption?EOC?of a vehicle can be used as a quick indicator of engine“health”.To date,the common method to determine the EOC is to compare the weights of engine oils before and after travelling about one thousand kilometers,which is time-consuming and expensive.Herein,we have developed a medical-inspired rapid method to determine the EOC using a concept from medical examination.The fundamential idea of this work is to introduce a special molecule into the gasoline or engine oils as the marker with easy detection and to obtain the estimated EOC by measuring the change of the marker in the exhaust.The investigated marker molecule include Au nanoparticles,FeCl₂ particles,FeCl₃ particles,Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles and ferrocene.Ferrocene is chosen as the engine oil marker due to its good solubility in organic solvents and stability at high temperature.The in-car experiment is carried out with the following protocol.First,ferrocene is supplemented to the engine oils and added to the engine oil tank.Then the car is started and the exhaust is collected for 20minutes in a device containing an acidic solution to ensure the complete absorption of Fe_xO_y.The concentration of Fe ions in the solution is measured by a portable device,and the concentrations before and after the introduction of ferrocene are compared to calculate the incremental.A large number of experimental results show that the increase of iron concentration has a strong positive correlation with the engine oil consumption and more importantly,the whole process takes less than 2 hours.In this work,the original exhaust collection device has some drawbacks of low efficiency and poor precision.So in this work,a more efficient and simple automobile exhaust collection device resembling distillation has been designed and utilized in the in-car experiment to ensure repeatability and stability.Finally,a standard protocol for rapid detection of engine oil consumption has been established.In order to get the best test results,the factors affecting the in-car experiment are optimized by orthogonal experiment.The obtained results show that:1.Among the four factors that affect the collection efficiency of vehicle exhaust,the order of influence is the amnout of ferrocene supplemented,the nature of collection solution,collection time,and the concentration of collection solution.2.The condition of 10 g ferrocene,0.5 mol/L sulfuric acid and collection of 30minutes is optimal to collect vehicle exhaust more quickly and effectively.Currently,a vehicle engine performance and durability testing platform is being build.It can not only rapidly and accurately determine of EOC for various engines,but also conduct the tests of other projects for many kinds of engines.The rapid detection method of engine oil consumption deleloped in this work has a broad prospect for quick vehicle examination in automobile service industry.