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The effects of injection pressure and swirl ratio on the in-cylinder soot oxidation are studied using simultaneous PLIF imaging of OH and LII imaging of soot in an optical diesel engine. Images are acquired after the end of injection in the recirculation zone between two adjacent diesel jets. Scalars are extracted from the images and compared with trends in engine-out soot emissions. The soot emissions decrease monotonically with increasing injection pressure but show a non-linear dependence on swirl ratio. The total amount of OH in the images is negatively correlated with the soot emissions, as is the spatial proximity between the OH and soot regions. This indicates that OH is an important soot oxidizer and that it needs to be located close to the soot to perform this function. The total amount of soot in the images shows no apparent correlation with the soot emissions, indicating that the amount of soot formed is a poor predictor of the emission trends.

Alternative fuels have been proposed as a means for future energy-secure and environmentally sustainable transportation. This review and benchmarking show that several of the alternative fuels (e.g. methanol, ethanol, higher alcohols, RME, HVO, DME, and biogas/CNG) work well with several different engine concepts such as conventional SI, DICI, and dual fuel, and with the emerging concepts HCCI, RCCI, and PPC. Energy consumption is in most cases similar to that of diesel or gasoline, with the exception of methanol and ethanol that use less energy, especially in SI engines. Tailpipe emissions of CO2 with respect to engine work output (tank-to-output shaft) can be reduced by more than 15% compared to a highly efficient gasoline SI engine, and are the lowest with CNG / lean-burn SI and with alcohols in several engine concepts. Alternative fuels are considered safe and in most cases are associated with reduced risk with respect to cancer and other health and environmental issues.

Heat loss is one of the greatest energy losses in engines. More than half of the heat is lost to cooling media and exhaust losses, and they thus dominate the internal combustion engine energy balance. Complex processes affect heat loss to the cylinder walls, including gas motion, spray-wall interaction and turbulence levels. The aim of this work was to experimentally compare the heat transfer characteristics of a stepped-bowl piston geometry to a conventional re-entrant diesel bowl studied previously and here used as the baseline geometry. The stepped-bowl geometry features a low surface-to-volume ratio compared to the baseline bowl, which is considered beneficial for low heat losses. Speed, load, injection pressure, swirl level, EGR rate and air/fuel ratio (λ) were varied in a multi-cylinder light duty engine operated in conventional diesel combustion (CDC) mode.

Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) is a promising combustion concept for future IC engines. However, controllability of PPC is still a challenge and needs more investigation. The scope of the present study is to investigate the ignition sensitivity of PPC to the injection timing at different injection pressures. To better understand this, high-speed shadowgraphy is used to visualize fuel injection and evaporation at different Start of Injections (SOI). Spray penetration and injection targeting are derived from shadowgraphy movies. OH* chemiluminescence is used to comprehensively study the stratification level of combustion which is helpful for interpretation of ignition sensitivity behavior. Shadowgraphy results confirm that SOI strongly affects the spray penetration and evaporation of fuel. However, spray penetration and ignition sensitivity are barely affected by the injection pressure.

Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) is a promising combustion concept with high thermodynamic efficiency and low emission level, and also with minimal modification of standard engine hardware. To use PPC in a production oriented engine, the optimal intake charge conditions for PPC should be included in the analysis. The experiments in this paper investigated and confirmed that the optimal intake conditions of net indicated efficiency for PPC are EGR between 50% and 55% as possible and the lambda close to 1.4. Heat-transfer energy and exhaust gas waste-energy contribute to the majority of the energy loss in the engine. The low EGR region has high heat-transfer and low exhaust gas enthalpy-waste, while the high EGR region has low heat-transfer and high exhaust gas waste-enthalpy. The optimal EGR condition is around 50% where the smallest energy loss is found as a trade-off between heat transfer and exhaust-gas enthalpy-waste.

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of charge stratification on the combustion phasing in a single cylinder, heavy duty (HD) compression ignition (CI) engine. To do this the start of injection (SOI) was changed from -180° after top dead centre (ATDC) to near top dead centre (TDC) during which CA50 (the crank angle at which 50% of the fuel energy is released) was kept constant by changing the intake temperature. At each SOI, the response of CA50 to a slight increase or decrease of either intake temperature or SOI were also investigated. Afterwards, the experiment was repeated with a different intake oxygen concentration. The results show that, for the whole SOI period, the required intake temperature to keep constant CA50 has a “spoon” shape with the handle on the -180° side.

This article presents a study related to application of pre-chamber ignition system in heavy duty natural gas engine which, as previously shown by the authors, can extend the limit of fuel-lean combustion and hence improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. A previous study about the effect of pre-chamber volume and nozzle diameter on a single cylinder 2 liter truck-size engine resulted in recommendations for optimal pre-chamber geometry settings. The current study is to determine the dependency of those settings on the engine size. For this study, experiments are performed on a single cylinder 9 liter large bore marine engine with similar pre-chamber geometry and a test matrix of similar and scaled pre-chamber volume and nozzle diameter settings. The effect of these variations on main chamber ignition and the following combustion is studied to understand the scalability aspects of pre-chamber ignition. Indicated efficiency and engine-out emission data is also presented.

The use of compressed natural gas (CNG) in light duty applications is still restricted to conventional spark ignition engines operating at low compression ratio, so overall efficiency is limited. A combustion concept that has been successfully applied on large stationary engines and to some extent on heavy-duty engines is dual-fuel combustion, where a compression-ignited diesel pilot injection is used to ignite a homogeneous charge of methane gas and air. CNG is injected in the intake ports during the intake stroke and later in the cycle the premixed air-CNG mixture is ignited via a pilot diesel injection close to top dead center. However, this concept has not been applied to a significant extent on light duty engines yet. The main reasons are linked to high temperature methane oxidation requirements and poor combustion efficiency at diluted conditions at low loads.

Methanol is today considered a viable green fuel for combustion engines because of its low soot emissions and the possibility of it being produced in a CO2-neutral manner. Methanol as a fuel for combustion engines have attracted interest throughout history and much research was conducted during the oil crisis in the seventies. In the beginning of the eighties the oil prices began to decrease and interest in methanol declined. This paper presents the emission potential of methanol. T-Φ maps were constructed using a 0-D reactor with constant pressure, temperature and equivalence ratio to show the emission characteristics of methanol. These maps were compared with equivalent maps for diesel fuel. The maps were then complemented with engine simulations using a stochastic reactor model (SRM), which predicts end-gas emissions. The SRM was validated using experimental results from a truck engine running in Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) mode at medium loads.