International Journal of Mechanical and Materials Engineering (IJMME), Vol. 2 (2007), No. 1, 40-47.
OPTIMAL DESIGN OF AUTOMOBILE EXHAUST SYSTEM USING
GT- POWER
A.K.M. Mohiuddin, Ataur Rahamn and Mohd. Dzaidin
Mechanical Engineering Department, International Islamic University Malaysia,
Jalan Gombak, Kuala Lumpur 53100, Malaysia,
E-mail: mohiuddin@iiu.edu.my
ABSTRACT
The exhaust system consists of the exhaust manifold, the
header, the catalytic converter, the muffler, and the tailpipe.
Certain flow characteristics must be met for the optimal
performance of the exhaust system. The main objective of this
paper is to design exhaust system (particularly the exhaust
manifold) using GT-Power software and to compare its
performance with an existing system. The newly designed
exhaust manifold shows lower back pressure which ultimately
results better performance of the engine.
Keywords: Exhaust system, GT-Power, Back pressure, Exhaust
manifold, Catalytic converter.
INTRODUCTION
A well designed exhaust system is one of the cheapest
ways of increasing engine efficiency, and therefore increasing
engine power. In a four stroke cycle engine, only one stroke out
of the four does useful work which is the power stroke. The
other three strokes which are intake, compression and exhaust
will absorb some of the power that was produced during the
power stroke. If the amount of power that is lost by these idle
strokes can be minimized, more power will be available to
drive the wheels, which is what the engine is supposed to be
doing [1].
It is clear that there are real gains if the exhaust gasses are
effectively removed from the combustion chamber. The pipe
configurations and/or size will cause back pressure in many
applications. Moreover, smoothly bent pipes, relatively free
flowing mufflers, headers, and a balance pipe will result in a
more efficient exhaust system and thus ensure greater
performance. A well designed exhaust system can even ‘draw’
the gasses out of the chamber, using the momentum of the gas
travelling down the pipe to suck the residual gasses out of the
combustion chamber. The gas travelling down the pipe creates
an area of low pressure behind it. This not only purges the
combustion chamber, but also draws more mixture into the
chamber during the valve overlap period. So, instead of having
high pressure exhaust gas popping into the inlet tracts, a partial
vacuum inside the combustion chamber is available which pulls
the fresh charge into the chamber when the intake valve opens.
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The main objective of this paper is to design exhaust
system (particularly the exhaust manifold) using GT-Power
software and to compare its performance with an existing
system.
The exhaust manifold, usually constructed of cast iron (due to
cost and manufacturability), is a pipe that conducts the exhaust
gases from the combustion chambers to the exhaust pipe. It has
smooth curves in it for improving the flow of exhaust gases.
The exhaust manifold is bolted to the cylinder head. A header is
a different type of manifold; it is made of separate equal-length
tubes. Four tube headers will slightly out perform three tube
and Ram Air manifolds, and the three tube headers and ram air
units are a little better than stock manifolds [2].
The exhaust pipe is the bent-up or convoluted pipes that
connect the entire exhaust system together. Some are shaped to
go over the rear axle, allowing the rear axle to move up and
down without bumping into the exhaust pipe; some are shaped
to bend around under the floor of the car, connecting the
catalytic converter with the muffler. Exhaust pipes are usually
made of stainless steel, since the high heat conditions involved
with the muffler system will cause rust. Exhaust pipes are
classified by their diameter, with wider diameters being
preferred for increased performance. A 2-1/2" system is
adequate for most street cars, and 3" exhaust pipes might help
slightly for faster cars. In addition to diameter, the actual design
of the exhaust pipe has a tremendous effect on performance.
The more bends, kinks, and rough edges inside the pipe, the
greater the internal friction on the exhaust gasses and the less
efficient the exhaust system. Therefore, well performed exhaust
systems usually feature with exhaust pipes that are smoothly
bent, smooth on the inside, and have minimum number of
bends as possible to reduce the friction inside the pipe. Uniform
diameter head-pipes of adequate size will improve performance
over carelessly bent or badly crimped pipes. Mandrel bent pipes
provide the best available performance.
To help reduce harmful emissions, modern cars have a
catalytic converter in the exhaust system. The catalytic
converter is installed in the exhaust line, between the exhaust
manifold and the muffler. Exhaust gases leave the engine under
very high pressure. If these gases escaped directly from the
engine the noise would be extremely high. For this reason, the
exhaust manifold sends the gases to a muffler, which is located
between the catalytic converter and the tail pipe. The muffler
quiets the noise of the exhaust by "muffling" the sound waves
created by the opening and closing of the exhaust valves.
GT-SUITE
GT-SUITE is an integrated set of computer-aided
engineering (CAE) tools developed by Gamma Technologies,
Inc. for design and analysis of engines, power trains and
vehicles. These tools are contained in a single executable form
which is essential to its use in "Integrated Simulations" [3]. GT-
SUITE comprised of six solvers (GT-Power, GT-Drive, GT-
Vtrain, GT-Cool, GT-Fuel, and GT-Crank), a model-building
interface (GT-ISE), a powerful post-processing package (GT-
POST), and a collection of supporting tools. GT-ISE provides
the user with the graphical user interface (GUI) that is used to
build models as well as the means to run all GT-SUITE
applications.
GT-POWER
GT-Power is the industry-standard engine simulation tool,
used by all leading engine and vehicle manufacturers and their
Figure 1: GT-Power Environment
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suppliers. It is also used for ship and power-generation engines,
small two and four stroke engines and racing engines (F1,
NASCAR, IRL, etc.). It provides the user with many
components to model any advanced concept. Among its
advantages is its ease of use and its tight integration with the
rest of GT-SUITE, which give GT-Power a "virtual engine"
perspective [4]. GT-Power environment is shown in Fig. 1. The
GT-SUITE environment also provides GT-Power with a proven
set of high-productivity features for pre- and post-processing,
optimization, neural networks and control modeling. Its
usefulness is further enhanced by integration with STAR-CD,
Fluent, Simulink and MS/EXCEL [4]. GT-Power is specifically
designed for both steady state and transient simulations. In
addition it can be used for analysis of engine/ power train
control. GT-Power is available as a standalone tool, or coupled
with GT-Drive, GT-Fuel and GT-Cool as the GT-SUITE / flow
product.
METHODOLOGY AND SIMULATION SETUP
The methodology used in performing the present work is
as follows:
1. Engine Selection - The specification of the engine is needed
as the input parameters.
2. Exhaust Manifold Measurement – The dimension of the
existing exhaust manifold has to be measured; several
dimensions of the newly designed exhaust manifold are
proposed by creating several geometry of the exhaust
manifold; and the geometry of the newly designed exhaust
manifold which gives the optimum performance will be
chosen to be fabricated.
3. GT-Power Modeling – The dimensions for both existing and
newly designed exhaust manifold will be modeled in GT-
Power software for simulation.
4. GT-Power Simulation – The simulation will be performed
and the result of both existing and newly designed exhaust
manifold will be compared.
The engine that has been selected is Proton Iswara 1.5L
gasoline engine [5]. The major area of concern in this work is
to focus on the design of exhaust manifold instead of the whole
components of exhaust system. However, in using the GT-
Power software, the whole components of exhaust manifold
must be included in the simulation and analysis because the
exhaust manifold by itself cannot perform its function if there
are no combinations of all exhaust components. In this project,
the pipes and flowsplits dimensions i.e. length, bend angle,
bend radius, of the existing exhaust manifold of Proton Iswara
are measured and they are being used as input data in the GT-
Power software. The other parts such as air cleaner, intake
manifold, fuel system, the engine, catalytic converter, muffler
and tailpipe will be kept same to use with the newly designed
exhaust manifold. The newly designed exhaust manifold is
designed by reducing the angle of bend pipes throughout the
exhaust gases path from the header up until the outlet of the
exhaust manifold itself. By reducing the angle of bend pipes,
the back pressure will be reduced so that the exhaust gases will
be removed easily from the engine cylinder and thus will give a
better breathing capability to the engine. In addition, the
diameter of the exhaust manifold pipes are also been enlarged a
bit to increase the rate of the exhaust gases velocity but must be
kept within an acceptable range to avoid other unwanted factors
to affect the performance.
MODEL SETUP PREPARATION
The drag and drop method is used to copy all the listed
templates/objects of table - 1 from the example object tree. If
the listed template/object is not inside the example object tree,
it could be copied from template library.
Modeling is started from pipe parts of air induction
process. First of all, the pipe from inlet (intake part) to air
cleaner will be modeled. Next, throttle part is modeled. It
covers from air cleaner intake site to throttle, which is located
in front of the surge tank. After intake manifold, engine is
modeled. The modeling will cover the engine head (intake port,
intake valve, exhaust port and exhaust valve) including the
engine cylinder. For the existing exhaust manifold, the pipes
are discretized into eight stages for the exhaust manifold. The
makes it easier to measure the angle of bend, radius of bend and
the length. There are four bend pipes at the first stage, another
four bend pipes at the second stage, four pipes at the third
stage, two flowsplits at the fourth stage, two bend pipes at the
fifth stage, two pipes at the sixth stage, one flowsplit at the

Table 1: Template/ Object from Template Library

COMPONENT COMPOUND CONNECTION
REFERENCE OBJECT
OBJECT OBJECT OBJECT

● FPropMixtureComb - Air - Pipe ● Engine ● Orifice Conn

● FStateInit - Init - FsplitTRight CrankTrain - bellmouth
● HeatCComp - ExhManifold - FsplitSphere ● InjAF-Ratio Conn
● RLTDependence - FARatio - FsplitGeneral ● ThrottleConn
- throttle
● FPropLiqInComp - Indolene- - PipeRoundBend
combust - ValveCamPR
● XYTable Conn - Inval
- FARvsRPM - ValveCamConn
- THB50vsRPM - Exval
- BDURvsRPM - EngCylinder
● XYZTable - INTPr - EndEnvironment
● FPropGas - Indolene-vap.

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seventh stage and one pipe at the final stage. The attribute meant for Muffler design. Firstly, the muffler would be drawn
folder below (Fig. 2) and connections (Fig. 3 and 4) show the using the available tools inside the software. Then, it will be
path of exhaust manifold path 1 until it enters the catalytic converted into parts which is executable by the GT Power.
converter. There is a special application in GT Power which is

Figure 2: Catalytic Converter Attribute

Figure 3: Catalytic Connections

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 Figure 4: Catalytic Converter Connections

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

The existing and the newly designed exhaust manifold geometry is shown in Fig. 5 and 6 respectively.

Path 1 Path 2 Path 4

Path 3

Figure 5: Existing Exhaust Manifold Geometry

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 Path 2
Path 1
Figure 6: Newly Designed Exhaust Manifold Geometry
Figure 7 shows that the back pressure for the existing
exhaust manifold is higher than the back pressure for the
newly designed exhaust manifold for all values of engine
speeds. This indicates that the designed exhaust manifold is
more efficient in terms of reducing the back pressure in the
exhaust manifold pipe. However, the graph only shows the
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Path 3 Path 4
result of the discretized pipe instead of the overall pipe length
but it is sufficient and clearly shown that reducing the angle of
bend pipes will reduce the back pressure which will give a
better breathing capability to the engine. Fig. 8 shows the
fabricated exhaust manifold according to design.
 Figure 7: Variation of Back Pressure with Engine Speed

Figure 8: Different Views of Designed and Fabricated Exhaust Manifold

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 REFERENCES
CONCLUSION
[1] Ganesan, V., 2004, “Internal Combustion Engines,”
The GT-Power is a very sophisticated simulation software
Second Edition, McGraw Hill.
to be used in designing the automobile exhaust system.
[2] Hillier, V.A.W. and Coombes, P., Hiller’s Fundamentals of
Apart from that, it can also be used to design any other
Motor Vehicle Technology, Nelson Thornes Ltd., United
parts in automobile applications. The newly designed
Kingdom, 2004.
exhaust manifold shows lower back pressure which
[3] Gamma Technologies, GT-Suite, www.gtisoft.com, 2004.
ultimately result better performance of the engine.
[4] Gamma Technologies, GT-Power User’s Manual, GT-
Suite Version 6.1, 2004.
[5] Proton Iswara Features & Specifications, www.eon.com,
2005.

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