Catool

Mechanical engineers and those who are involved into undertakings that entail combustion engine performance metrics, could use a tool for deriving such indicators from in-cylinder pressure data.

Catool is an application that was developed in order to offer people a tool for post-processing cylinder pressure data that has been collected from an internal combustion engine. Often times, this data will come from piezo-electric pressure transducers.

By analyzing the cylinder pressure curves, one can better understand how a particular engine functions and where adjustments regarding performance or economy can be performed.

Some of the parameters that the application calculates include burned mass fraction, burn angles, net and gross head release, knock intensity, pressure rise rates, minimum/maximum pressure or thermodynamic loss angle.

Catool also deals with the format conversion, absolute pressure referencing, error detection and correction that is required when performing such analysis.

Its importing capabilities include raw combustion data from the industry standard AVL I file formats and ASCII text files, therefore allowing users a great degree of flexibility when dealing with “off-the-shelf” data acquisition systems.

The application was designed in order to offer prompt feedback and able to perform changes that can suit a wide range of combustion analysis tasks.