Search Results

HCCI combustion was studied in a 4-stroke gasoline engine with a direct injection system. The electronically controlled two-stage gasoline injection and spark ignition system were adopted to control the mixture formation, ignition timing and combustion rate in HCCI engine. The engine could be operated in HCCI combustion mode in a range of load from 1 to 5 bar IMEP and operated in SI combustion mode up to load of 8 bar IMEP. The HCCI combustion characteristics were investigated under different A/F ratios, engine speeds, starts of injection, as well as spark ignition enabled or not. The test results reveal the HCCI combustion features as a high-pressure gradient after ignition and has advantages in high thermal efficiency and low NOx emissions over SI combustion. At the part load of 1400rpm and IMEP of 3.5bar, ISFC in HCCI mode is 25% lower and NOx emissions is 95% lower than that in SI mode.

Occurrence of sporadic super-knock is the main obstacle to the development of advanced gasoline engines. One of the possible inducements of super-knock, agglomerated soot particle induced pre-ignition, was studied for high boosted gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines. The correlation between soot emissions and super-knock frequency was investigated in a four-cylinder gasoline direct injection production engine. The test results indicate that higher in-cylinder soot emission correlate with more pre-ignition and super-knock cycles in a GDI production engine. To study the soot/carbon particles trigger super-knock, a single-cylinder research engine for super-knock study was developed. The carbon particles with different temperatures and sizes were introduced into the combustion chamber to trigger pre-ignition and super-knock.

A new combustion mode namely multiple premixed compression ignition (MPCI) for gasoline engines was proposed. The MPCI mode can be realized by two or more times gasoline injections into cylinder with a high pressure around the compression TDC and featured with a premixed combustion after each injection in the cylinder, which is different from the existed gasoline direct injection compression ignition (GDICI) modes such as homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) mode with gasoline injection occurred in intake stroke, and partially premixed compression ignition (PPCI) mode with multiple gasoline injections in intake and compression strokes before the start of combustion (SOC). Therefore the spray and combustion of the MPCI mode are alternatively occurred as "spray-combustion-spray-combustion" near the TDC, rather than "spray-spray-combustion" sequence as traditional PPCI gasoline engines.

Homogeneous charge combustion and emissions of ethanol ignited by pilot diesel fuel were investigated on a two-cylinder diesel engine. The results show that emissions depend on loads and ethanol volume fraction. At low loads, ethanol has little effects on smoke. With the increase of ethanol, NOx decreases, but CO emissions increase. At high loads, smoke emissions reduce greatly with increasing ethanol, but NOx and total hydrocarbon (THC) emissions increase. With the increase of ethanol, ignition delays, combustion duration shortens. The maximum rates of heat release for the fuel containing 10 vol% ethanol (E10) and 30 vol% ethanol (E30) increase. Brake specific energy consumption (BSEC) of E10 and E30 is improved slightly only at full loads. Compared to smoke emissions obtained on the same engine using ethanol blended diesel fuels, the tendency of smoke reduction is similar to that of homogeneous charge combustion of ethanol at the same operating conditions.

The detailed chemical kinetics was implemented into the 0D single-zone model, 1D engine cycle model and 3D CFD model respectively. Both simulation and experiment were carried out on a four-stroke gasoline HCCI engine with direct injection. The 0D model (HRG) was developed to study the isolating effect of HCCI parameters. The 1D engine cycle model with HRG was established to study the gas exchange process and the direct injection strategy in the gasoline HCCI engine with two-stage direct injection (TSDI) and negative valve overlap (NVO). The 3D model with HRG was constructed to study the ignition control mechanism in “two-zone HCCI” combustion via analysis the auto-ignition spots distribution in combustion chamber. “Two-zone HCCI” is defined in this paper as premixed ultra-lean compression ignition combining with premixed ultra-rich compression ignition. The three models were validated by experiments.

This study improved the computational efficiency significantly using parallel computation and reduced mechanisms. A 3-dimensional engine moving mesh of intake port, exhaust port and combustion chamber was established for HCCI engine cycle simulation. To achieve a more accurate analysis, chemical kinetics was implemented into the CFD code to study the intake, spray, ignition, combustion, and pollution formation process in HCCI engine. The simulations were run on a cluster of 16-CPU, parallelized by Message-Passing Interface (MPI) mode. The cases with detailed and reduced reaction mechanisms were calculated using 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 CPUs respectively and the corresponding computational time and speed-up were discussed. Using MPI 8-CPU with reduced mechanism (less than 40 species) is the optimal scheme for CFD/Chemistry calculation of typical HCCI engine.

Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines developed at nineties of the twentieth century can greatly improve the fuel economy. But the combustion chamber design and mixture control of the engines are very complex compared with Port Fuel Injection (PFI) gasoline engines. A two-stage gasoline direct injection (TSGDI) combustion system is developed and aimed to solve the problem of the complexity. Two-stage fuel injection and flexible injection timings are adopted as main means to form reasonable stratified mixture in the cylinder. A simple combustion chamber and helical intake port are designed to assist the mixture's stable combustion, which reduces the difficulties of the combustion system design. Systematical simulation and experimental studies of the effects of injection strategies such as different first,second injection timings and injection ratios, on the mixture formation processes and engine performanc are made in detail.

In order to enhance the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines, a combustion mode namely Homogeneous Charge Induced Ignition (HCII) was introduced and examined in this paper. Port-injected gasoline was used as the main fuel and formed a homogeneous charge in the cylinder. Diesel was used as the pilot fuel, directly injected into the cylinder, and self-ignited and this induced the ignition of the premixed gasoline-air charge. The images of HCII combustion process were taken on an optical engine through a high-speed CMOS camera. The multi-point induced ignition phenomena were observed and the parameters like flame luminance, ignition delay and combustion duration were analyzed by image analysis. The result shows that as the gasoline/diesel ratio increases with a fixed low pilot amount, the ignition delay increases, the initial ignition area extends from the center towards the periphery of the combustion chamber, and the combustion velocity increased.