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The aim of this work has been to investigate the influence of bio-diesel (FAME - fatty acid methyl ester) and reasonable blends of FAME and diesel, on the behavior of the mixture formation, the combustion process and the emission levels of a modern diesel engine. Therefore experimental investigations have been carried out on a single cylinder engine which is a modification of a four cylinder production HSDI (high speed direct injection) diesel engine. Cylinder pressure and tail-pipe emissions have been measured. Additionally the injector has been mounted on a flow-metering device to gather information about the pure flow through the injection system depending on the fuel type. In parallel with the experimental investigations CFD (computational fluid dynamics) calculations have been carried out in order to closely check local effects inside the injector and the combustion chamber.

The present work is focused on multidimensional simulations of combustion in Diesel engines, using detailed kinetics reaction schemes. The selected reaction mechanism is the scheme developed by Liu et al. [1].The simulations are performed through the open source CFD Toolbox OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulation). OpenFoam uses finite volume methods to solve systems of partial differential equations ascribed on any 3D unstructured mesh of polyhedral cells. A preliminary analysis relevant for diesel combustion studies is performed in constant volume homogeneous conditions. Here the treatment of the stiff ordinary differential equations arising from the usage of detailed kinetics reaction mechanisms and the performance of different solvers are investigated. The CVODE package has been integrated in OpenFOAM, as an alternative solver to the one provided by the original version of the code.

Active prechamber combustion systems for SI engines represent a feasible and effective solution in reducing fuel consumption and pollutant emissions for both marine and ground heavy-duty engines. However, reliable and low-cost numerical approaches need to be developed to support and speed-up their industrial design considering their geometry complexity and the involved multiple flow length scales. This work presents a CFD methodology based on the RANS approach for the simulation of active prechamber spark-ignition engines. To reduce the computational time, the gas exchange process is computed only in the prechamber region to correctly describe the flow and mixture distributions, while the whole cylinder geometry is considered only for the power-cycle (compression, combustion and expansion). Outside the prechamber the in-cylinder flow field at IVC is estimated from the measured swirl ratio.