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A low-pressure hydrogen direct-injection solution is presented that allows some typical benefits of direct injection, such as high specific power and backfire prevention, plus low residual storage pressure, that improves vehicle range and is a typical advantage of external mixture formation. Since the injection must end early enough to allow good charge homogeneity and, in any case, before in-cylinder pressure rise constraints hydrogen admission, especially at heavy loads hydrogen flow to the cylinder is higher than present electro-injectors allow. The injection is realised in two steps: hydrogen flow rate is simply controlled by a conventional CNG electro-injector that feeds a small intermediate chamber. From this chamber hydrogen next enters the cylinder in a short crank angle period by means of a mechanically-actuated valve that opens at the intake valve closure to avoid backfire.

A study was performed that takes into account both turbulence and chemical kinetic effects in the numerical simulation of diesel engine combustion in order to better understand the importance of their respective roles at changing operating conditions. An approach was developed which combines the simplicity and low computational and storage requests of the laminar-and-turbulent characteristic-time model with a detailed combustion chemistry model based on well-known simplified mechanisms. Assuming appropriate simplifications such as steady state or equilibrium for most of the radicals and intermediate species, the kinetics of hydrocarbons can be described by means of three overall steps. This approach was integrated in the KIVA-II code. The concept was validated and applied to a single-cylinder, heavy-duty engine. The simulation covers a wide range of operating conditions.