Aramco Americas and Argonne National Lab collaborate on advanced transportation systems

Aramco Americas and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory extend partnership to create more efficient and sustainable engines and fuels.

Aramco Americas has partnered with several research teams at Argonne over the past five years, and the extension will add three more years to the program.

Areas of collaboration have included analyzing emissions using life-cycle analysis and fleet analysis, assessing the efficiency and emissions of advanced vehicle technologies such as gasoline compression ignition engines, and using supercomputers to generate novel computational fluid dynamics models aimed at improving engine fuel efficiency and emissions.

“The partnership with Argonne has made important strides that have improved the ability of scientists and policy makers to model and understand fundamental questions regarding emissions from vehicle fleets around the world, and emissions tradeoffs associated with different technologies,” said Ghaithan AlMuntasheri, Director of R&D, Aramco Americas. “The teams are also evaluating new technologies for their ability to reduce emissions from transportation via improved engine and powertrain design.”

The collaboration includes data and hardware from Aramco Americas, along with its scientists.

The scope of the contract extension supports joint efforts in life-cycle analysis and fleet modeling, vehicle and powertrain modeling, computational fluid dynamics for high-fidelity engine simulations, fuel spray characterization using X-Ray diagnostics, and characterization of fuel properties in advanced internal combustion engines.

The work has yielded multiple publications, conference presentations, and awards. Most recently in 2019 the Aramco Research Center—Detroit , Argonne National Laboratory and Convergent Science won an Editor's Choice award at HPCwire magazine's 2019 contest for the most innovative projects in high performance computing. The “Best Use of High-Performance Computing in Automotive” recognized the evaluation of a new gasoline compression ignition engine by using an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to analyze thousands of high-fidelity engine designs in days rather than months. To date, the collaboration has resulted in 26 peer-reviewed journals and more than 50 conference presentations.

“The Aramco and Argonne collaboration has been an excellent example of how the national labs can leverage unique expertise and facilities to support industry and the government goals at the same time,” said Don Hillebrand, Division Director of Energy Systems.

The Aramco Research Center—Detroit is part of a global Transport Technology program and leads the company's transport efforts in the Americas. The Aramco transport R&D program has additional facilities in Europe, Asia and Saudi Arabia.

Learn more about Aramco Americas and its commitment to technology and innovation.

Learn more about Aramco's global transport technologies program.