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To simulate the air-fuel mixing in the intake ports and cylinders of internal combustion engines, a fuel liquid film model is developed for integration in 3D CFD codes. Phenomena taken into account include wall film formation by an impinging spray, film transport such as governed by mass and momentum equations with wall and air flow interactions and evaporation considering energy and convection mass transfer equations. A continuous-fluid method is used to describe the wall film over a three dimensional complex surface. The basic approximation is that of a laminar incompressible boundary layer; the liquid film equations are written in an integral form and solved by a first-order ALE finite volume scheme; the equation system is closed without coefficient fitting requirements. The model has been implemented in a Multi-Block version of KIVA 2 (KMB) and tested against problems having theoretical solutions.

The Lagrangian-Eulerian approach is commonly used to simulate engine sprays. However typical spray computations are strongly mesh dependent. This is explained by an inadequate space resolution of the strong velocity and vapor concentration gradients. In Diesel sprays for instance, the Eulerian field is not properly computed close to the nozzle exit in the vicinity of the liquid phase. This causes an overestimated diffusion that leads to inaccuracies in the modeling of fuel-air mixing. By now it is not possible to enhance grid resolution since it would violate requested assumptions for the Lagrangian liquid phase description. Besides, a full Eulerian approach with an adapted mesh is not practical at the moment mainly because of prohibitive computer requirements. Keeping the Lagrangian-Eulerian approach, a new methodology is introduced: the full Lagrangian-Eulerian Coupling (CLE).