Know the secret of Ford’s EcoBoost engine

Every year February 28 is observed as the National Science Day, which celebrates physicist CV Raman’s discovery known as ‘Raman Effect’. The day is commemorated to uphold the significance of scientific applications in our daily lives and how every day is an innovation.

Science is a continuous process of discovery and development. Ford, a part of automobile industry, had its own noteworthy scientific journey with its Award-winning 1.0 litre EcoBoost engine, which was named “Best Engine” in its class at the 2016 International Engine of the Year Awards, based on drivability, performance, economy, refinement and technology.

To win this award a lot of thinking has been invested in Ford’s 40 years’ journey. "Engines today are basically lumps of metal without the software," shared John Rollinger, Ford Motor Company's technical leader for powertrain and gasoline engine control. “That little black box (inside any hood of an EcoBoost powered engine) is actually the brain powering the entire vehicle. Without it, there would be no EcoBoost,” he said.

The software behind the EcoBoost helps it to act like a much larger engine when customers want power – whether it’s on the track or accelerating on the highway to avoid a dangerous situation – while having the capability to be extremely efficient during day-to-day driving.

But how did the software behind the fuel efficient range of EcoBoost engines come about? “In the ‘70s, software began playing a larger role in engine technology. The shift wasn’t born out of the need for more power, but from a need to build cleaner, more fuel efficient cars,” informed Rollinger.

"The fuel crisis that hit in the mid ‘70s was a major turning point for Ford in terms of developing cleaner and more fuel-efficient engines,” he shared. “People were beginning to demand engines that were fuel efficient but didn’t sacrifice performance, and we quickly realised that the best way forward was with the help of software solutions,” he added.

The first three generations of EEC gave Ford vehicles basic control of key engine elements, including electronic fuel injection, spark control and air-fuel ratio. But the major breakthrough in software processing came in the mid '80s with the introduction of EEC-IV and EEC-V. By the mid ‘90s engines were completely controlled electronically. In 2003 a major breakthrough hit – Ford introduced drive-by-wire.

This meant that drivers were no longer linked mechanically to the engine; instead their accelerator inputs were fed through the ECU that directly controls the engine.However, to achieve the proposed level of power and efficiency for the new generation engines, an extraordinary level of precision was required. From ultra-precise fuel injections to continuously fluctuating fuel injection pressure, minuscule changes controlled by software made all the difference.

“To be able to extract maximum efficiency out the hardware, we had to piece together hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code and related parameters. In the end we created one of the most sophisticated suites of software in the automotive industry at the time, and EcoBoost was born,” shared Rollinger.

The outcome was a fuel efficient and power-dense engine. The EcoBoost software also helped the team to eliminate the traditional limitations of turbocharged engines, such as turbo lag this means that when a driver steps on the accelerator, there’s minimal delay and they’ll immediately feel that soulful “oomph” of the EcoBoost engine.