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Ethanol direct injection (EDI) is a new technology to use ethanol fuel more efficiently in spark ignition engines. Fuel temperature is one of the key factors which determine the evaporation process of liquid fuel spray, and consequently influence the combustion and emission generation of the engine. To better understand the mixture formation process of the EDI spray and provide experimental data for engine modelling, experiments were conducted in a constant volume chamber in engine-like conditions. The high speed Shadowgraphy imaging technique was used to capture the ethanol spray behaviours. The experiments covered a wide range of fuel temperature, ranged from 275 K (non-evaporating) to 400 K (flash-boiling). Particularly the transition of the ethanol spray from normal-evaporating to flash-boiling was investigated.

Ethanol direct injection (EDI) has great potential in facilitating the downsizing technologies in spark ignition engines due to its strong anti-knock ability. The fuel temperature may vary widely from non-evaporating to flash-boiling sprays in real engine conditions. In this study, a CFD spray model was developed in the ANSYS Fluent environment, which was capable to simulate the EDI spray and evaporation characteristics under non-evaporating, transition and flash-boiling conditions. The turbulence was modelled by the realizable k-ε model. The Rinzic heterogeneous nucleation model was applied to simulate the primary breakup droplet size at the nozzle exit. The secondary breakup process was modelled by the Taylor Analogy Breakup model. The evaporation process was modelled by the Convection/Diffusion Controlled Model. The droplet distortion and drag, collision and droplet-wall interaction were also included.

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.