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Premixed charge compression ignition (PCCI) is an interesting alternative to conventional diesel combustion, as it allows very low emission levels for part load operation. The difficult control of the onset of combustion is an obstacle to the implementation of PCCI. In a recent study, different mixtures of gasoline and diesel fuel have been used in a modified diesel engine to delay the ignition and thus to allow for a substantial premixing time. For these cases, very low levels of particulate emissions have been reported. However, the emissions of CO and NOx were considerably high. In this study, combustion and pollutant formation in the above-mentioned modified diesel engine are simulated using the representative interactive flamelet (RIF) approach. A detailed chemical reaction mechanism for a mixture of n-heptane, iso-octane, toluene, and ethanol, serving as surrogate fuel for the diesel-gasoline blend, is used for the simulations.

The occurrence of severe events of ‘super-knock’ originating from random pre-ignition kernels which sometimes is observed in turbo-charged spark-ignition engines was recently attributed by Kalghatgi and Bradley [4] to developing detonations which originate from a resonance between acoustic waves emitted by an auto-igniting ‘hot spot’ and a reaction wave which propagates along negative temperature gradients in the fuel-air mixture. Their occurrence depends on the steepness of the local instantaneous temperature gradient and on the length of the region of negative gradient. The theory requires that the temperature gradient extends smoothly over a sufficient length in the turbulent flow field. Then localized detonations may develop which are able to autoignite the entire charge within less than a millisecond and thus cause pre-ignition and ‘super-knock’.