Ronghua Huang

Investigation to Charge Cooling Effect of Evaporation of Ethanol Fuel Directly Injected in a Gasoline Port Injection Engine

ABSTRACT Ethanol direct injection plus gasoline port injection (EDI+GPI) is a new technology to make the use of ethanol fuel more effective and efficient in spark ignition engines. It takes the advantages of ethanol fuel, such as its greater latent heat of vaporization than that of gasoline fuel, to enhance the charge cooling effect and consequently to increase the compression ratio and improve the engine thermal efficiency. Experimental investigation has shown improvement in the performance of a single cylinder spark ignition engine equipped with EDI+GPI. It was inferred that the charge cooling enhanced by EDI played an important role. To investigate it, a CFD model has been developed for the experimentally tested engine. The Eulerian-Lagrangian approach and Discrete Droplet Model were used to model the evolution of the fuel sprays. The model was verified by comparing the numerical and experimental results of cylinder pressure during the intake and compression strokes. Mesh density and time step sensitivities have been tested. The verified model was used to investigate the charge cooling effect of EDI in terms of spatial and temporal distributions of cylinder temperature and fuel vapor fraction. Compared with GPI only, EDI+GPI demonstrated stronger effect on charge cooling by decreased in-cylinder temperature. The cooling effect was limited by the low evaporation rate of the ethanol fuel due to its lower saturation vapor pressure than gasolines in low temperature conditions.

Tests and Numerical Simulations on the Thermal Load of the Cylinder Head in Heavy-Duty Vehicle Diesel Engines

The paper has explored the solutions to the thermal overload in the cylinder head of a heavy-duty vehicle 6-cylinder diesel engine and the thermal cracks in the valve-bridge of the engine. The experiments include measuring the temperature of the cylinder head bottom and testing the flow distribution of coolant through the upper nozzles of cylinder head bottom. The follow-up analysis was conducted on the causes of the excessive thermal load of the cylinder head bottom, the thermal cracks in the valve-bridge region, and the rationality of the structure of the water jacket for the cylinder head. The mechanism of the water jacket of cylinder head was further inquired. Then 3-D CFD numerical simulation of water jacket in the sixth cylinder, which is in the worst cooling condition, is performed. To enhance the flow form in water jacket and lower the cost of enhancement, we proposed 4 schemes of water jacket and conducted the numerical simulations to these schemes. It was identified that all these schemes have efficiently improved the flow field in water jacket. In the typical proposed scheme 1 in which 6 nozzles of all the 10 upper nozzles were blocked, the coolant flow rate on the bottom of the water jacket and in the cylinder head valve-bridge region increased by about 68.73%. The measuring results of the cylinder head bottom temperature show that the maximum temperature in the valve-bridge region of cylinder head is reduced by 9.2 °C and the temperature gradient reduction is 19.55 percent, suggesting that the thermal load and thermal stress of the studied diesel engine cylinder head has been significantly lowered.Copyright

Experiments on the Influence of Cooling Conditions on Thermal Balance and Thermal State for a Heavy-Duty Natural Gas Engine

Generally, the turbulent-flame velocity of natural gas is significantly lower than diesel in the combustion process, which results in the thermal loads of natural gas engines being significantly higher than those of diesel engines under the same stoichiometric condition without EGR. In this study, a heavy-duty natural gas engine is taken as the research object, which is used to measure the temperatures to analyze the heat transfer characteristics in the cylinder head water jacket around the valve bridges, under different speeds and loads, as well as different coolant temperatures and pressures. Twelve thermocouples are inserted by drilling through the metal in the cylinder head with different heights to measure the metal temperatures at thermally critical areas such as the valve-bridge regions. Therefore, the local heat flux and the extrapolation to coolant wall temperatures are obtained by Fourier’s Law under different engine operating conditions. In addition, the thermal balance tests of the engine are also carried out, and the energy distributions are analyzed in different parts of the engine. The results of the research show that: a) the engine cooling condition has a direct impact on the engine cylinder head temperature. If the cooling temperature is low, the temperatures of the cylinder head’s measuring points have the same increases as the increasing coolant temperature. When the coolant temperature is high, the measuring temperatures have hardly any difference from the increases in cooling temperature. With increasing cooling pressure, the temperature increase at all measuring points, and the temperature of the measuring points varies substantially under high load conditions compared with the low load condition. The results indirectly indicated that local nucleate boiling appeared in the water jacket. b) The heat transfer characteristic curve of the water jacket was obtained from the processing of experimental data. Wall heat flux increases with increasing load, and the relationship between wall heat flux and wall temperature is no longer linear. The heat transfer characteristic curve indicates that the convective heat transfer and boiling heat transfer both appeared in the cooling water jacket. c) With the decrease of engine load, the percentage of crankshaft power in the combustion heat gradually decreases, then the percentage of the heat taken away by the cooling water increases gradually. At the same time, the percentage of the heat taken away by exhaust has changed little. d) The engine cooling temperature has a substantial influence on the engine thermal balance, and the cooling pressure has little effect on the engine thermal balance. With increasing cooling temperature, the heat taken by the cooling water decreased, which lead to an increase in the proportion of crankshaft power. It can be concluded that properly increasing the coolant temperature of the engine can improve the fuel economy of the machine.Copyright

STUDY ON STRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION AND EVALUATION INDEX OF COOLING CAPACITY IN A BI-LAYER COOLANT JACKET OF CYLINDER HEAD

To solve problems such as thermal overload in the cylinder head of a 6-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine and the thermal cracks in the valve-bridge of the engine. Structure of the coolant jacket was optimized from monolayer to bi-layer, and structures of upper nozzles were also optimized using the orthogonal experimental design method in this paper. At present, the cooling capacity of the coolant jacket in cylinder head is mainly judged by the coolant velocity. In this paper, the coolant heat transfer coefficient (HTC) was adopted as the criterion to evaluate the heat transfer process in cylinder head. Both of the velocity and HTC were used as the evaluation indexes to obtain the optimum schemes respectively. To determine which evaluation index fits the actual heat transfer process better, and which optimized schemes should be adopted, the temperatures in the bottom of the cylinder head were measured. The experimental results show that it is better to evaluate the cooling capacity of coolant jackets by HTC. HTC reflects the actual heat transfer process much better than velocity.Copyright