An Optical and Numerical Characterization of Directly Injected Compressed Natural Gas Jet Development at Engine-Relevant Conditions

Joshua Lacey; Marie Meulemans; Farzad Poursadegh; Michael Brear; Phred Petersen; Ulrich Kramer; Adam Smith; Mike Hornby; Doug Cosby; Perry Czimmek

doi:10.4271/2019-01-0294

Compressed natural gas (CNG) is an attractive, alternative fuel for spark-ignited (SI), internal combustion (IC) engines due to its high octane rating, and low energy-specific CO₂ emissions compared with gasoline. Directly-injected (DI) CNG in SI engines has the potential to dramatically decrease vehicles’ carbon emissions; however, optimization of DI CNG fueling systems requires a thorough understanding of the behavior of CNG jets in an engine environment.

This paper therefore presents an experimental and modeling study of DI gaseous jets, using methane as a surrogate for CNG. Experiments are conducted in a non-reacting, constant volume chamber (CVC) using prototype injector hardware at conditions relevant to modern DI engines. The schlieren imaging technique is employed to investigate how the extent of methane jets is impacted by changing thermodynamic conditions in the fuel rail and chamber.

Post-processing of these optical results presents challenges because of the similarity between the density of methane and the background nitrogen. A methodology to interpret the jet extent in the high-speed movies is therefore proposed and used to quantify methane jet propagation and structure. The processed experimental results are compared 1D gas dynamics models and previously established jet penetration correlations. Exploiting the theory of underexpanded gas jets and using simple arguments, several experimental trends are qualitatively captured by the 1D model.

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An Optical and Numerical Characterization of Directly Injected Compressed Natural Gas Jet Development at Engine-Relevant Conditions 2019-01-0294

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