Business & Money | Monday 2 February, 2015 12:03 am |

Ingenium, the new family of premium diesel and petrol engines designed, engineered and manufactured by Jaguar Land Rover, delivers class-leading levels of torque, horsepower and refinement while reducing emissions and fuel consumption.

The company today revealed more of the technical details of these new lightweight, compact low-emissions modular engines as it showcased some of the company’s future technologies.

Ingenium: Configurable, Flexible, Modular

Jaguar Land Rover has developed its own new family of advanced technology, low-friction, high-performance petrol and diesel engines to meet growing customer demand for lower fuel consumption and cost of ownership, without comprising performance and the driver experience.

Ingenium’s design brief presented Jaguar Land Rover’s engineers with a tough and complex challenge. Its new engine family would need to be:

Configurable and flexible to enable seamless installation in a range of new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles
Scalable up and down to create smaller or larger displacement variants in the future
Able to accommodate a range of powertrain layouts including rear-, all- and four-wheel drive
Engineered to support manual and automatic transmissions as well as electrified hybrid drive systems
Easily accepting of new advances in engine technologies as they become available

Jaguar Land Rover powertrain engineers at the company’s Whitley and Gaydon development facilities have based Ingenium’s foundation on extremely strong and compact aluminium blocks for both diesel and petrol versions.

These lightweight blocks share the same bore, stroke, cylinder spacing and 500cc cylinder capacity. This helps give Ingenium the configurability and flexibility around which smaller or larger engines can quickly and efficiently be developed to meet future regulatory and competitive requirements To support the development of this future powertrain technology, including the new Ingenium family, Jaguar Land Rover has invested £40 million to expand and enhance its Powertrain Engineering facility at its Whitley Technical Centre.
All diesel and petrol Ingenium variants will be equipped with state-of-the-art turbochargers that improve performance, particularly at low speeds, and that help reduce consumption and C02 emissions.

Ingenium’s modular design enables both petrol and diesel engines to share many common internal components and calibration strategies. This reduces complexity, raises quality and simplifies manufacturing, and allows Jaguar Land Rover to react more quickly to changes in global demand.

“Customers around the world are increasingly demanding cleaner-running, more efficient vehicles that maintain or even enhance the performance attributes expected of a rugged all-terrain vehicle or a high performance car. Our Ingenium engines deliver this to a new level.” said Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart, Jaguar Land Rover Group Engineering Director.

“Engineering and manufacturing our own engines improves our ability to react to changes in demand and improves our ability to react to changes in legislation and competitive technologies in the future”, added Dr Ziebart. “We believe that with the range of technologies we are investing in, Jaguar Land Rover can absolutely satisfy the often conflicting requirements of delivering engaging high-performance luxury vehicles that reduce our carbon footprint in the long-term.”

Technology Powerhouse

Ingenium bristles with innovations that will deliver more of what Jaguar Land Rover’s global customers expect from premium high-performance engines: outstanding low-end torque, effortless acceleration and class-leading emissions performance with low consumption.

One strategy Jaguar Land Rover powertrain engineers used to accomplish this was a focus on reducing internal friction.

In the first Ingenium engine to go into volume production, a 2.0-litre diesel known as AJ200D, friction is reduced by 17 per cent compared to the current engine, helping to make it one of the most efficient and responsive 2.0-litre turbo diesels in its segment.

Ingenium engines feature six key technologies that combine to reduce friction, add refinement and improve performance. They include:

Roller bearings on cam and balancer shafts, instead of machined-in bearing surfaces.
Computer-controlled variable oil pumps that save energy by delivering the optimum amount of oil at all speeds, engine loads and temperatures.
Computer-controlled variable water pumps that adjust the amount of coolant flowing through the engine, based on temperature, speed and driving conditions. The split or twin circuit cooling system offers the twin benefits of lowering C02 emissions by enabling fast warm ups, and providing quick cabin heat on cold days.
Simplified cam drive system designed for modular application.
Crankshafts that are offset from the centre of the block.
Electronically controlled piston cooling jets to improve efficiency in the oil pumping circuit. Jets are switched off when piston cooling is not needed. They also enable the engine to reach its optimum operating temperature faster, further helping to reduce C02 emissions.

All Ingenium engines will be equipped with advanced and efficient turbochargers, central direct high-pressure fuel injection, variable valve timing and start-stop technology.

Ingenium will also come to market as one of the most tested and proven Jaguar Land Rover engines ever. Before the first Ingenium engine is sold, it will have already undergone the equivalent of more than eight years of the toughest, most punishing testing that Jaguar Land Rover engineers could devise. These tests include a huge range of integrity and durability testing, including more than 72,000 hours of dyno testing and 2 million of miles of real-world testing to ensure these engines deliver – and continue to deliver.

Key Role in Vehicle Weight Reduction

Jaguar Land Rover already leads the industry in the production of lightweight, aluminum-bodied vehicles. The introduction of Ingenium unites the company’s light-weight chassis expertise with powertrains specifically designed and calibrated to complement reduced weight vehicles.

Jaguar Land Rover engineers are focusing on reducing vehicle weight by optimizing every component in every system, powertrains included. Despite adding features and increasing power output, Ingenium engines weigh as much as 80 kg less than today’s equivalent engines.

“Ingenium fulfils our commitment to offer our global customers some of the most advanced powertrains available in some of the lightest vehicles in the premium SUV and performance car segments,” said Ron Lee, Jaguar Land Rover Director of Powertrain Engineering.

“Being configurable and flexible are the two key strands of Ingenium’s DNA because we have future-proofed our new engines from the outset. Ingenium will be able to accept new advances in fuel, turbocharging, emissions, performance and electrification technologies when they are ready and accessible to be deployed.

“We were able to design Ingenium in this way because we had the rare opportunity to start the project with a clean sheet of paper. We weren’t locked into any of the usual restrictions that force engineering compromises because we had no existing production machinery that would dictate design parameters, no carryover engine architectures to utilise and no existing factory to modify,” said Lee.