Michael Bergin

The effect of swirl ratio and fuel injection parameters on CO emission and fuel conversion efficiency for high-dilution, low-temperature combustion in an automotive diesel engine.

Support for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies. The research was performed at the Combustion Research Facility, Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, California. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation,a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. The BK21 and Future Vehicle Technology Development Corps. of Korea supported Sanghoon Kooks visiting research. The authors express their appreciation to Mark Musculus and Lyle Pickett for providing the high speed camera and the Matlab source code to calculate the adiabatic flame temperature.

Fuel Injection and Mean Swirl Effects on Combustion and Soot Formation in Heavy Duty Diesel Engines

High-speed video imaging in a swirl-supported (Rs = 1.7), direct-injection heavy-duty diesel engine operated with moderate-to-high EGR rates reveals a distinct correlation between the spatial distribution of luminous soot and mean flow vorticity in the horizontal plane. The temporal behavior of the experimental images, as well as the results of multi-dimensional numerical simulations, show that this soot-vorticity correlation is caused by the presence of a greater amount of soot on the windward side of the jet. The simulations indicate that while flow swirl can influence pre-ignition mixing processes as well as post-combustion soot oxidation processes, interactions between the swirl and the heat release can also influence mixing processes. Without swirl, combustion-generated gas flows influence mixing on both sides of the jet equally. In the presence of swirl, the heat release occurs on the leeward side of the fuel sprays. Asymmetric combustion-induced flows alter the vorticity on the leeward side of the jet and lead to better entrainment and fuel-air mixing during the period of peak heat release. This leads to lower local equivalence ratio and lower soot production rates with swirl.

Examination of Initialization and Geometric Details on the Results of CFD Simulations of Diesel Engines

Computational fluid dynamic simulations using the AVL FIRE and KIVA 3V codes were performed to examine commonly accepted techniques and assumptions used when simulating direct injection diesel engines. Simulations of a steady-state impulse swirl meter validated the commonly used practice of evaluating the swirl ratio of diesel engines by integrating the valve flow and torque history over discrete valve lift values. The results indicate the simulations capture the complex interactions occurring in the ports, cylinder, and honeycomb cell impulse swirl meter. Geometric details of engines due to valve recesses in the cylinder head and piston cannot be reproduced axisymmetrically. The commonly adopted axisymmetric assumption for an engine with a centrally located injector was tested by comparing the swirl and emissions history for a noncombusting and a double injection low temperature combustion case with varying geometric fidelity. Consideration of the detailed engine geometry including valve recesses in the piston altered the swirl history such that the peak swirl ratio at TDC decreased by approximately 10% compared with the simplified no-recess geometry. An analog to the detailed geometry of the full 3D geometry was included in the axisymmetric geometry by including a groove in the cylinder head of the mesh. The corresponding emissions predictions of the combusting cases showed greater sensitivity to the altered swirl history as the air-fuel ratio was decreased.

Optimization of Injector Spray Configurations for an HSDI Diesel Engine at High Load

CFD simulations were conducted with the KIVA-3v code with improved spray and combustion sub-models. Combustion analysis was performed using micro-genetic optimizations for a 1.9L HSDI diesel engine at a high load operating conditions (∼15 bar imep). The study explored injector spray configurations, including the number of injector nozzle holes, the hole diameters, and their orientations. The engine swirl ratio and start-of-injection timing were also varied. The optimizations considered injector nozzles with 14, 12, 10 and 8 injector holes. Each configuration included consideration of a pair of injector holes. Variations in the orientation angle of the first hole were explored. For the second hole, both the orientation angle and the azimuthal spacing relative to the first hole were varied. The chosen parameters allowed the holes to be symmetrically spaced or coincident azimuthally. The performance of each simulation was based on a merit function which accounts for fuel economy, NOx and soot emissions. For the test conditions chosen, an 8-hole injector configuration was found to be the best. This is explained by the improved fuel spray penetration and mixing associated with a smaller number of large diameter nozzle holes. For all injector configurations, the optima selected groups of holes where the total angular spacing between holes was less than eight degrees. The optimum swirl ratio found was approximately that of the baseline engine design.Copyright