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We have proposed the application of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) gas dissolved fuel which might improve spray atomization through effervescent atomization instead of high injection pressure. Since EGR gas is included in the spray of EGR gas dissolved fuel, it directly contributes to combustion, and the further reduction of NOx emissions is expected rather than the conventional external EGR. In our research, since highly contained in the exhaust gas and highly soluble in the fuel, CO2 was selected as the dissolved gas to simulate EGR gas dissolved. In this paper, the purpose is to evaluate the influence of the application of CO2 gas dissolved fuel on the combustion characteristics and emission characteristics inside the single cylinder, direct injection diesel engine. As a result, by use of the fuel, smoke was reduced by about 50 to 70%, but NOx reduction does not have enough effect.

In previous study, the model for flash-boiling spray of multicomponent fuel was constructed and was implemented into KIVA code. This model considered the detailed physical properties and evaporation process of multicomponent fuel and the bubble nucleation, growth and disruption in a nozzle orifice and injected fuel droplets. These numerical results using this model were compared with experimental data which were obtained in the previous study using a constant volume vessel. The spray characteristics from numerical simulation qualitatively showed good agreement with the experimental results. Especially, it was confirmed from both the numerical and experimental data that flash-boiling effectively accelerated the atomization and vaporization of fuel droplets. However, in this previous study, injection pressure was very low (up to 15 MPa), and the spray characteristics of high pressure injection could not be analyzed.

We have proposed the application of EGR gas dissolved fuel which might improve spray atomization through effervescent atomization instead of high injection pressure. In this paper, the purpose is to evaluate the influence of the application of CO2 gas dissolved fuel on the combustion characteristics and emissions inside the single cylinder, direct injection diesel engine. As a result, by use of the fuel, smoke was reduced by about 50 to 70%. The amount of NOx was reduced at IMEP=0.3 MPa, but it was increased at IMEP=0.9 MPa.

The CO2 gas dissolved fuel for the diesel combustion is effective to reduce the NOx emissions to achieve the internal EGR (Exhaust Gas Recirculation) effect by fuel. This method has supplied EGR gas to the fuel side instead of supply EGR gas to the intake gas side. The fuel has followed specific characteristics for the diesel combustion. When the fuel is injected into the chamber in low pressure, this CO2 gas is separated from the fuel spray. The distribution characteristics of the spray are improved and the improvement of the thermal efficiency by reduction heat loss in the combustion chamber wall, and reduce soot emissions by the lean combustion is expected. Furthermore, this CO2 gas decreases the flame temperature. Further, it is anticipated to reduce NOx emissions by the spray internal EGR effect.

Fuel design approach has been proposed as the control technique of spray and combustion processes in diesel engine to improve thermal efficiency and reduce exhaust emissions. In order to kwow if this approach is capable of controlling spray flame structure and interaction between the flame and a combustion chamber wall, the present study investigated ignition and flame characteristics of dual-component fuels, while varying mixing fraction, fuel temperature and ambient conditions. Those characteristics were evaluated through chemiluminescence photography and luminous flame photography. OH radical images and visible luminous flame images were analyzed to reveal flame shape aspect ratio and its fractal dimension.

Ignition, combustion and emissions characteristics of dual-component fuel spray were examined for ranges of injection timing and intake-air oxygen concentration. Fuels used were binary mixtures of gasoline-like component i-octane (cetane number 12, boiling point 372 K) and diesel fuel-like component n-tridecane (cetane number 88, boiling point 510 K). Mass fraction of i-octane was also changed as the experimental variable. The experimental study was carried out in a single cylinder compression ignition engine equipped with a common-rail injection system and an exhaust gas recirculation system. The results demonstrated that the increase of the i-octane mass fraction with optimizations of injection timing and intake oxygen concentration reduced pressure rise rate and soot and NOx emissions without deterioration of indicated thermal efficiency.

Auto-ignition and combustion processes of dual-component fuel spray were numerically studied. A source code of SUPERTRAPP (developed by NIST), which is capable of predicting thermodynamic and transportation properties of pure fluids and fluid mixtures containing up to 20 components, was incorporated into KIVA3V to provide physical fuel properties and vapor-liquid equilibrium calculations. Low temperature oxidation reaction, which is of importance in ignition process of hydrocarbon fuels, as well as negative temperature coefficient behavior was taken into account using the multistep kinetics ignition prediction based on Shell model, while a global single-step mechanism was employed to account for high temperature oxidation reaction. Computational results with the present multi-component fuel model were validated by comparing with experimental data of spray combustion obtained in a constant volume vessel.

Three-dimensional large eddy simulation (LES) has been conducted for a diesel spray flame using KIVALES which is LES version of KIVA code. Modified TAB model, velocity interpolation model and rigid sphere model are used to improve the prediction of the fuel-mixture process in the diesel spray. Combustion is simulated using the Eddy-Dissipation model. CIP method was incorporated into the KIVALES in order to suppress the numerical instability on the combustible flow. The formation of soot and NO was simulated using Hiroyasu model and KIVA original model. Three different grid resolutions were used to examine the grid dependency. The result shows that the LES approach with 0.5 mm grid size is able to resolve the instantaneous spray with the intermittency in the spray periphery, the axi-symmetric shape and meandering flow after the end of injection as shown in the experimental results.

It is thought that the synthetic gas, including hydrogen and carbon monoxide, has a potential to be an alternative fuel for internal combustion engines, because a heating value of the synthetic gas is higher than one of hydrogen or natural gas. A purpose of this study is to acquire stable auto-ignition and combustion of the synthetic gas which is supposed to be applied into a direct-injection compression ignition engine. In this study, the effects of ambient gas temperatures and oxygen concentrations on auto-ignition characteristics of the synthetic gas with changing percentage of hydrogen (H2) or carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations in the synthetic gas. An electronically-controlled, hydraulically-actuated gas injector was used to control a precise injection timing and period of gaseous fuels, and the experiments were conducted in an optically accessible, constant-volume combustion chamber under simulated quiescent diesel engine conditions.

This paper describes the results of on-board measurement of engine performance and emissions in diesel vehicle operated with bio-diesel fuels. Here, two waste-cooking oils were investigated. One fuel is a waste-cooking oil methyl esters. This fuel is actually applied to a garbage collection vehicle with DI diesel engine (B100) and the city bus (B20; 80% gas oil is mixed into B100 in volume) as an alternative fuel of gas oil in Kyoto City. Another one is a fuel with ozone treatment by removing impurities from raw waste-cooking oils. Here, in order to improve the fuel properties, kerosene is mixed 70% volume in this fuel. This mixed fuel (i-BDF) is applied into several tracks and buses in Wakayama City. Then, these 3 bio-diesel fuels were applied to the on-board experiments and the results were compared with gas oil operation case.

The maximum liquid-phase penetration and vaporization behavior was investigated by using simultaneous measurement for mie-scattered light images and shadowgraph ones. The objective of this study was to analyze effect of variant parameters (injection pressure, ambient gas condition and fuel temperature) and fuel properties on vaporization behavior, and to investigate liquid phase penetration for the single- and multi-component fuels. The experiments were conducted in a constant-volume vessel with optical access. Fuel was injected into the vessel with electronically controlled common rail injector.

Flash-boiling occurs when a fuel is injected to a combustion chamber where the ambient pressure is lower than the saturation pressure of the fuel. It has been known that flashing is a favorable mechanism for atomizing liquid fuels. On the other hand, alternative fuels, such as gaseous fuels and oxygenated fuels, are used to achieve low exhaust emissions in recent years. In general, most of these alternative fuels have high volatility and flash-boiling takes place easily in fuel spray, when they are injected into the combustion chamber of an internal combustion engine under high pressure. In addition, fuel design concept the multicomponent fuel with high and low volatility fuels has been proposed in the previous study in order to control the spray and combustion processes in internal combustion engine. It is found that the multicomponent fuel produce flash-boiling with an increase in the initial fuel temperature.

This work investigates the soot formation process in diesel jet flame using a detailed kinetic soot model implemented into the KIVA-3V multidimensional CFD code and 2D imaging by use of time-resolved laser induced incandescence (LII). The numerical model is based on the KIVA code which is modified to use CHEMKIN as the chemistry solver using Message Passing Interface (MPI). This allows for the chemical reactions to be simulated in parallel on multiple CPUs. The detailed soot model used is based on the method of moments, which begins with fuel pyrolysis, followed by the formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, their growth and coagulation into spherical particles, and finally, surface growth and oxidation of the particles. The model can describe the spatial and temporal characteristics of soot formation processes such as soot precursors distributions, nucleation rate and surface reaction rate.

This paper provides new insights on the mechanism of the smokeless diesel combustion with oxygenated fuels, based on a combination of soot kinetic modeling and optical diagnostics. The chemical effects of fuel compositions, including aromatics - paraffins blend, neat oxygenated fuels and oxygenate additives, on sooting equivalence ratio ‘ϕ’ - temperature ‘T’ dependence were numerically examined using a detailed soot kinetic model. To better understand the physical factors affecting soot formation in oxygenated fuel sprays, the effects of injection pressure and ambient gas temperature on the flame lift-off length and relative soot concentration in oxygenated fuel jets were experimentally investigated. The computational results show that the leaner mixture side of soot formation peninsula on the ϕ - T map, rather than the lower temperature one, should be utilized to suppress the formation of PAHs and ultra-fine particles together with the large reduction in particulate mass.

In this study, the novel fuel design concept has been proposed in order to realize the low emission and combustion control in engine systems. In this fuel design concept, the mixed fuels with a high volatility fuel (gasoline or gaseous fuel components) and a low volatility fuel (gas oil or fuel oil components) are used in order to improve the spray characteristics by flash boiling. In our previous papers on this study, the fundamental characteristics of spray and its combustion of mixed fuel were reported. In this paper, heat release and exhaust emission (smoke, NOx and THC) characteristics of single cylinder diesel engine operated with the mixed fuels were investigated under each load. The exhaust performance of diesel engine could be improved using mixed fuel, because fuel properties and spray characteristics were controlled by changing mixing fraction of the mixed fuel.

Considering the bell-shaped temperature dependence of soot particle formation, the control of flame temperature has a possibility to drastically suppress of soot formation. Furthermore, oxygenated fuels are very effective on soot reduction, and the use of these kinds of fuels has a potentiality for smokeless diesel combustion. In this paper, the effects of flame lift-off and flame temperature on soot formation in oxygenated fuel sprays were experimentally investigated using a constant volume combustion vessel which simulated diesel engine conditions. The diffusion flame lift-off length was measured in order to estimate the amount of the oxygen entrained upstream of the flame lift-off length in the fuel jet. This was determined from time-averaged OH chemiluminescence imaging technique. Also, the flame temperature and soot concentration were simultaneously evaluated by means of two-color method.

In previous our work, we revealed that the flash boiling process could improve remarkably the spray atomization for the pure substance-single component fuel in relation to the port-injected S.I. engines. Then, we applied this flash boiling spray to the Diesel spray process by the use of the two phase region formed between liquefied CO2 and n-Tridecane as the first step of fuel design concept. And the promoted atomization properties could be obtained in this mixed fuel concept. Further, we could obtain the simultaneous reduction of NO and soot emissions in Diesel engine exhaust due to the spray internal EGR effect and reburning of soot. As the second step, we proposed a novel fuel design concept for low exhaust emission and combustion control, relating to mixed and reformulated fuels with a lower boiling point fuel such as gasoline components or gas fuel and a higher boiling point fuel such as gas oil or heavy oil components to obtain the both advantages of their fuels for combustion.

In SI engines with port injection system, the injected fuel spray adheres surely on the port wall and the inlet valve, consequently, the spray-wall interaction process leads to the generation of unburned hydrocarbons and uncontrollable mixture formation. This paper deals with the fuel mixture preparation process including basic research on characteristics of the wall-wetted fuel film on a flat wall inside a constant volume vessel. In the experiments, iso-octane mixed with biacetyl as a tracer dopant was injected through a pintle type injector against a flat glass wall under the ambient conditions of atmospheric pressure and room temperature. The thickness of the adhered fuel film on the wall was quantitatively measured by using laser induced fluorescence (LIF) technique, which provides 2-D distribution information with high special resolution as a function of the injection duration, the impingement distance from the injector to the wall, and the impingement angle against the wall.

We propose a new concept on simultaneous reduction of NO and soot emissions in Diesel engine exhaust by use of the diesel fuel oil (n-Tridecane) with liquefied CO2 dissolved. The CO2 dissolved component is expected to undergo flash boiling or gas separation when being injected into the combustion chamber, and improve spray atomization and mixing process both of which are primary factors to govern soot formation. Further, the internal EGR effect caused by CO2 component injected with the fuel is expected for NO formation. In order to assess this concept, spray dynamics measurement was conducted in the constant volume vessel with a variation of ambient pressure and temperature. Further, combustion experiments were carried out by using a rapid compression and expansion machine. Here, characteristics of the evaporative mixed fuel spray were examined by shadowgraph photography.

For current passenger vehicles, multi-point injection (MPI) systems are extensively employed for gasoline engines due to ease of control and rapid response. In these systems, the pressure within the intake manifold to which the injectors are installed can fall below the saturated vapor pressure of some hydrocarbon components present in the fuel. Such a condition leads to an atomization process in which flash boiling occurs. In the present work, the atomization process under flash boiling conditions has been characterized both experimentally and theoretically. The experimental investigation has been carried out with a spray test facility consisting of a variable pressure chamber equipped with a pintle type fuel nozzle. Infrared Extinction/Scattering (IRES) is utilized to provide temporal and spatially resolved distribution of the fuel vapor concentration within the spray.