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Opposed-piston 2-stroke (OP-2S) engines have the potential to achieve higher thermal efficiency than a typical diesel engine. However, the uniflow scavenging process is difficult to control over a wide range of speeds and loads. Scavenging performance is highly sensitive to pressure dynamics, port timings, and port design. This study proposes an analysis of the effects of port vane angle on the scavenging performance of an opposed-piston 2-stroke engine via simulation. A CFD model of a three-cylinder opposed-piston 2-stroke was developed and validated against experimental data collected by Achates Power Inc. One of the three cylinders was then isolated in a new model and simulated using cycle-averaged and cylinder-averaged initial/boundary conditions. This isolated cylinder model was used to efficiently sweep port angles from 12 degrees to 29 degrees at different pressure ratios.

In-cylinder thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) have the capability to reduce fuel consumption by reducing wall heat transfer and to increase exhaust enthalpy. Low thermal conductivity, low volumetric heat capacity thermal barrier coatings tend to reduce the gas-wall temperature difference, the driving potential for heat transfer from the gas to the combustion chamber surfaces. This paper presents a coupling between an analytical methodology for multi-layer coated wall surface temperature prediction with a fully calibrated production model in a commercial system-level simulation software package (GT-Power). The wall surface temperature at each time step was calculated efficiently by convolving the engine wall response function with the time-varying surface boundary condition, i. e., in-cylinder heat flux and coolant temperature. This tool allows the wall to be treated either as spatially uniform with one set of properties, or with independent head/piston/liner components.

The principal objective of the present work is to investigate the fundamental characteristics of a commercially available outwardly opening twin-fluid injector, which utilizes air-assisted atomization principle to attain pulse-type injection of fuel-air mixture. The electromagnetic characteristics of this injector were simulated and the effects of dominating parameters on the electromagnetic force to drive injector were ascertained. On that basis, this paper elaborates on the fundamental characteristics of air-assisted spray using gasoline and kerosene with the employment of two types of optical testing techniques. The spray morphological evolution under varied fuel injection durations and ambient pressures were captured with high-speed shadowgraph thus the corresponding external macroscopic characteristics were obtained and further compared. Spray droplet velocity and diameter at fixed monitoring location were measured by using PDPA (Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer).

Appropriate spray modeling in multidimensional simulations of diesel engines is well known to affect the overall accuracy of the results. More and more accurate models are being developed to deal with drop dynamics, breakup, collisions, and vaporization/multiphase processes; the latter ones being the most computationally demanding. In fact, in parallel calculations, the droplets occupy a physical region of the in-cylinder domain, which is generally very different than the topology-driven finite-volume mesh decomposition. This makes the CPU decomposition of the spray cloud severely uneven when many CPUs are employed, yielding poor parallel performance of the spray computation. Furthermore, mesh-independent models such as collision calculations require checking of each possible droplet pair, which leads to a practically intractable O(np2/2) computational cost, np being the total number of droplets in the spray cloud, and additional overhead for parallel communications.

The deformation of injector components cannot be disregarded as the pressure of the system increases. Deformation directly affects the characteristics of needle movement and injection quantity. In this study, structural deformation of the nozzle, the needle and the control plunger under different pressures is calculated by a simulation model. The value of the deformation of injector components is calculated and the maximum deformation location is also determined. Furthermore, the calculated results indicates that the deformation of the control plunger increases the control chamber volume and the cross-section area between the needle and the needle seat. A MATLAB model is established to The influence of structural deformation on needle movement characteristics and injection quantity is investigate by a numerical model. The results show that the characteristic points of needle movement are delayed and injection quantity increases due to the deformation.

An opposed piston two-stroke engine is more suitable for use in an unmanned aerial vehicle because of its small size, excellent self-balancing, stable operation, and low noise. Consequently, in this study, based on experimental data for a prototype opposed piston two-stroke engine, numerical simulation models were established using GT-POWER for 1D simulation and AVL-FIRE for 3D CFD simulation. The mesh grid and solver parameters for the numerical model of the CFD simulation were determined to guarantee the accuracy of the numerical simulation, before studying and optimizing the ventilation efficiency of the engine with different dip angles. Furthermore, the fuel spray and combustion were analyzed and optimized in details.

Aiming at the high altitude operation problems for piston-type aero-engines and to improve the practical ceiling and high altitude dynamic performance, this thesis analyzes a controllable three-stage composite supercharging system, using a two-stage turbocharger coupled supercharger method. The GT-Power simulation model of a four-cylinder boxer engine was established, and the control strategy of variable flight height was obtained. The simulation research of engine performance from 0 to 20,000 meters above sea level has been carried out, which shows that the engine power is at the same level as the plain condition, and it could still maintain 85.28 percent of power even at the height of 20,000 meters, which meets the flight requirements of the aircraft.

In this work we studied the effects of piston bowl design on combustion in a small-bore direct-injection diesel engine. Two bowl designs were compared: a conventional, omega-shaped bowl and a stepped-lip piston bowl. Experiments were carried out in the Sandia single-cylinder optical engine facility, with a medium-load, mild-boosted operating condition featuring a pilot+main injection strategy. CFD simulations were carried out with the FRESCO platform featuring full-geometric body-fitted mesh modeling of the engine and were validated against measured in-cylinder performance as well as soot natural luminosity images. Differences in combustion development were studied using the simulation results, and sensitivities to in-cylinder flow field (swirl ratio) and injection rate parameters were also analyzed.

Diesel piston bowl geometry can affect turbulent mixing and therefore it impacts heat-release rates, thermal efficiency, and soot emissions. The focus of this work is on the effects of bowl geometry and injection timing on turbulent flow structure. This computational study compares engine behavior with two pistons representing competing approaches to combustion chamber design: a conventional, re-entrant piston bowl and a stepped-lip piston bowl. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed for a part-load, conventional diesel combustion operating point with a pilot-main injection strategy under non-combusting conditions. Two injection timings are simulated based on experimental findings: an injection timing for which the stepped-lip piston enables significant efficiency and emissions benefits, and an injection timing with diminished benefits compared to the conventional, re-entrant piston.

Although turbocharging can extend the high load limit of low temperature combustion (LTC) strategies such as reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI), the low exhaust enthalpy prevalent in these strategies necessitates the use of high exhaust pressures for improving turbocharger efficiency, causing high pumping losses and poor fuel economy. To mitigate these pumping losses, the divided exhaust period (DEP) concept is proposed. In this concept, the exhaust gas is directed to two separate manifolds: the blowdown manifold which is connected to the turbocharger and the scavenging manifold that bypasses the turbocharger. By separately actuating the exhaust valves using variable valve actuation, the exhaust flow is split between two manifolds, thereby reducing the overall engine backpressure and lowering pumping losses. In this paper, results from zero-dimensional and one-dimensional simulations of a multicylinder RCCI light-duty engine equipped with DEP are presented.

Methanol has been regarded as a potential transportation fuel due to its advanced combustion characteristics and flexible source. However, it is suffering from misfire and high HC emissions problems under cold start and low load conditions either on methanol SI engine or on methanol/diesel dual fuel engine. Hydrogen is a potential addition that can enhance the combustion of methanol due to its high flammability and combustion stability. In the current work, the effect of hydrogen fraction on the laminar flame characteristics of methanol- hydrogen-air mixture under varied equivalence ratio was investigated on a constant volume combustion chamber system coupled with a schlieren setup. Experiments were performed over a wide range of equivalence ratio of the premixed charge, varied from 0.8 to 1.4, as well as different hydrogen fraction, 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% (n/n). All tests were carried out at fixed temperature and pressure of 400K and 0.1MPa.

The acquisition of more authentic cylinder pressure data is the basis of engine combustion analysis. Due to the multiple advantages, quartz piezoelectric pressure transducers are generally applied to the measurement of the cylinder pressure. However, these transducers can only produce dynamic cylinder pressure data which may be significantly different from the actual values. Thus, the cylinder pressure data need to be corrected through a certain method, while different cylinder pressure correction methods will cause result divergences of the combustion analysis. This paper aims to acquire a proper cylinder pressure correction method by carrying out theoretical analysis based on the polytropic process in the compression stroke as well as the experimental research of the cylinder pressure of a turbocharged eight-cylinder diesel engine.

As known, the constant injection mass is a criterion for measuring the thermal efficiency of diesel engines. In this study, the effects of nozzle hole diameter on diesel free-spray characteristics were investigated in constant injection mass condition. The experiment was performed in a constant volume combustion chamber equipped with a high pressure common-rail injector that can change nozzles. Three single-hole axis nozzles with different hole diameters were used. High speed camera and Schlieren visualization set-up were used to capture the spray behaviors of liquid phase and vapor phase respectively. For liquid phase spray, the higher nozzle hole diameter, the higher were the liquid phase spray penetration rate and the saturated liquid phase spray penetration length. The saturated liquid phase spray penetration length wound not grow but oscillate around different mean values at the steady stage.

The electronic control of direct injection fuel system, which could improve engine fuel efficiency, dynamics and engine emission performance through good atomization, precise control of fuel injection time and improvement of fuel-gas mixture, is the key technology to achieve the stratified combustion and lean combustion. In this paper, a direct injection injector that based on voice coil motor was designed aiming at the technical characteristics of one 800cc two-stroke cam-less engine. Prior to a one - dimensional simulation model of injector was established by AMEsim and the maximal fuel injection demand was met via the optimization of the main parameters of the injector, the structure of the voice coil motor was optimized by magnetic equivalent circuit method. After that, the maximal flow rate of the injector was verified by the injector bench test while the atomization characteristic of the injector was verified by using a high-speed camera.

The Opposed Piston Two-Stroke (OPTS) engine has many advantages on power density, fuel tolerance, fuel flexibility and package space. A type of self-balanced opposed-piston folded-crank train two-stroke engine for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was studied in this paper. AVL BOOST was used for the thermodynamic simulation. It was a quasi-steady, filling-and-emptying flow analysis -- no intake or exhaust dynamics were simulated. The results were validated against experimental data. The effects of high altitude environment on engine performance have been investigated. Moreover, the matching between the engine and turbocharger was designed and optimized for different altitude levels. The results indicated that, while the altitude is above 6000m, a multi-stage turbocharged engine system need to be considered and optimized for the UAV.

The electric compound turbocharger(ECT) which integrates a high speed motor into a turbocharger rotor shaft can be used transiently to accelerate the turbocharger more quickly in response to an acceleration requirement. It can utilize the exhaust gas energy fully to improve the engine fuel efficiency and benefit for engine with lower emissions. The key technique of ECT is to solve the reliability problems when an electrical motor is integrated into a turbocharger shaft between the turbine and compressor wheels will increase the burden for the bearing support and affect the turbocharger shaft rotation characteristics. In order to know the dynamics behavior of higher load bearing system is explored for reliability, this paper focus on the nonlinear rotor dynamics characteristics of ECT rotor bearing system.

In this work, linear, non-linear and a generalized renormalization group (RNG) two-equation RANS turbulence models of the k-epsilon form were compared for the prediction of turbulent compressible flows in diesel engines. The object-oriented, multidimensional parallel code FRESCO, developed at the University of Wisconsin, was used to test the alternative models versus the standard k-epsilon model. Test cases featured the academic backward facing step and the impinging gas jet in a quiescent chamber. Diesel engine flows featured high-pressure spray injection in a constant volume vessel from the Engine Combustion Network (ECN), as well as intake flows in a high-swirl diesel engine. For the engine intake flows, a model of the Sandia National Laboratories 1.9L light-duty single cylinder optical engine was used.

Dual-fuel combustion combining a premixed charge of compressed natural gas (CNG) and a pilot injection of diesel fuel offer the potential to reduce diesel fuel consumption and drastically reduce soot emissions. In this study, dual-fuel combustion using methane ignited with a pilot injection of No. 2 diesel fuel, was studied in a single cylinder diesel engine with optical access. Experiments were performed at a CNG substitution rate of 70% CNG (based on energy) over a wide range of equivalence ratios of the premixed charge, as well as different diesel injection strategies (single and double injection). A color high-speed camera was used in order to identify and distinguish between lean-premixed methane combustion and diffusion combustion in dual-fuel combustion. The effect of multiple diesel injections is also investigated optically as a means to enhance flame propagation towards the center of the combustion chamber.

Radial flow Variable Nozzle Turbine (VNT) enables better matching between the turbocharger and engine. At partial loading or low-end engine operating points, the nozzle vane opening of the VNT is decreased to achieve higher turbine efficiency and transient response, which is a benefit for engine fuel consumption and emission. However, under certain small nozzle opening conditions (such as nozzle brake and low-end operating points), strong shock waves and strong nozzle clearance flow are generated. Consequently, strong rotor-stator interaction between turbine nozzle and impeller is the key factor of the impeller high cycle fatigue and failure. In present paper, flow visualization experiment is carried out on a linear turbine nozzle. The turbine nozzle is designed to have single-sided clearance, and the Schlieren visualization method is used to describe the formation and development process of clearance flow and shock wave under different clearance and expansion ratio configurations.

Hydrogen is a promising energy carrier because it is characterized by a fast combustion velocity, a wide range of sources, and clean combustion products. A hydrogen internal combustion engine (H2ICE) with a turbocharger has been used to solve the contradiction of power density and control NOx. However, the selection of a H2ICE compressor with a turbocharger is very different from traditional engines because of gas fuel. Hydrogen as a gas fuel has the same volume as its cylinder and thus increases pressure and reduces the mass flow rate of air in cylinder for a port fuel injection-H2ICE (PFI-H2ICE). In this study, a general method involving a H2ICE with a turbocharger is proposed by considering the effect of hydrogen on cylinders. Using this method, we can calculate the turbocharged pressure ratio and mass flow rate of air based on the target power and general parameters. This method also provides a series of intake temperatures of air before calculation to improve accuracy.