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The current trend in automobiles is towards electrical vehicles, but for the most part these vehicles still require an internal combustion engine to provide additional range and flexibility. These engines are under stringent emissions regulations, in particular, for the reduction of CO2. Gas engines which run lean burn combustion systems provide a viable route to these emission reductions, however designing these engines to provide sustainable and controlled combustion under lean conditions at λ=2.0 is challenging. To address this challenge, it is possible to use a scavenged Pre-Chamber Ignition (PCI) system which can deliver favorable conditions for ignition close to the spark plug. The lean charge in the main combustion chamber is then ignited by flame jets emanating from the pre-chamber nozzles. Accurate prediction of flame kernel development and propagation is essential for the analysis of PCI systems.

In this study, the influence of injector diameter on the combustion of diesel sprays in an optically accessible combustion chamber of marine engine dimensions and conditions has been investigated experimentally as well as numerically. Five different orifice diameters ranging between 0.2 and 1.2 mm have been considered at two different ambient temperatures: a “cold” case with 800 K and a “warm” case with 900 K, resulting in a total of ten different test conditions. In the experiment, the reactive spray flames were characterized by means of high-speed OH* chemiluminescence imaging. The measurements revealed a weak impact of the injector diameter on ignition delay (ID) time and flame lift-off length (LOL) whereas the influence of ambient temperature was found to be more pronounced, consistent with former studies in the literature for smaller orifice diameters.

Future engine emission legislation regulates soot from Diesel engines strictly and requires improvements in engine calibration, fast response sensor equipment and exhaust gas aftertreatment systems. The in-cylinder phenomena of soot formation and oxidation can be analysed using a pyrometer with optical access to the combustion chamber. The pyrometer collects the radiation of soot particles during diffusion combustion, and allows the calculation of soot temperature and a proportional value for the in-cylinder soot density (KL). A four-cylinder heavy-duty Diesel engine was equipped in all cylinders with prototype pyrometers and state of the art pressure transducers. The cylinder specific data was recorded crank angle-resolved for a set of steady-state and transient operating conditions, as well as exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) addition and over a wide range of soot emissions.

Ignition systems for large lean burn gas engines are challenged by large energy deposition requirements to ensure stable and reliable inflammation of the premixed charge. In this study, two different ignition systems are investigated experimentally: ignition by means of injecting a small amount of diesel spray and its subsequent autoignition is compared to the ignition with an un-scavenged pre-chamber spark plug over a wide range of engine relevant conditions such as methane equivalence ratios and thermomechanical states. The ignition behavior as well as the combustion phase of the two systems is investigated using an optically accessible Rapid Compression Expansion Machine (RCEM). Filtered OH-chemiluminescence images of the ignition and combustion were taken with a UV intensified high speed camera through the piston window.

The behavior of spray auto-ignition and combustion of a diesel spray in a lean premixed methane/air charge was investigated. A rapid compression expansion machine with a free-floating piston was employed to reach engine-relevant conditions at start of injection of the micro diesel pilot. The methane content in the lean ambient gas mixture was varied by injecting different amounts of methane directly into the combustion chamber, the ambient equivalence ratio for the methane content ranged from 0.0 (pure air) to 0.65. Two different nozzle tips with three and six orifices were employed. The amount of pilot fuel injected ranged between 0.8 and 1.8 percent of the total energy in the combustion chamber. Filtered OH chemiluminescence images of the combustion were taken with a UV-intensified high-speed camera through the optical access in the piston.

The limiting values for NOx and HC concentrations in the exhaust gas of SI engines will be further lowered by legislation in many countries during the next years. This necessitates an improvement of the pollution control systems, which is achieved by including the dynamics of the three way catalyst into the control system. Before a control system can be designed, the dynamic behaviour of the exhaust after treatment system including the sensors has to be properly analyzed. As a first step a dynamic model of a solid-electrolyte oxygen sensor has been derived. It was the goal to obtain a better understanding of the cross sensitivities towards both reducing and oxidizing exhaust gas components such as H2, CO, O2 and NO. The model consists of three parts. Firstly, the porous protection layer, where only diffusion is assumed to occur, secondly the porous catalytic electrodes where the redox reactions take place and thirdly the solid electrolyte, where the electric potential is generated.

A key point in three-way catalytic converter modeling problems is the definition of a possible chemical scheme able to represent the catalyzed process inside the converter, especially during transients. The lack of precise kinetic measurements during the transient thermal phase makes hard the choice of the kinetic expressions and, overall, of the chemical parameter values. To solve this problem here we propose the use of neural networks (NN) to model the reaction kinetics since a NN structure can provide enough degrees of freedom to capture all the significant features of the real system. Since the NN is embedded into the overall TWC dynamics, it cannot be trained through one of the standard method and some difficulties arise when dealing with the parameter tuning of this model, that are circumvented using a genetic algorithm (GA).

This paper deals with the influence of a wall soot layer of varying thickness on the unsteady heat transfer between the fluid and the engine cylinder wall during a full cycle of a four-stroke Diesel engine operation. For that purpose a computational investigation has been carried out, using a one-dimensional model of a multi-layer solid wall for simulating the transient response within the confinement of the combustion chamber. The soot layer is thereby of varying thickness over time, depending on the relative rates of deposition and oxidation. Deposition is accounted for due to a thermophoretic mechanism, while oxidation is described by means of an Arrhenius type expression. Results of the computations obtained so far show that the substrate wall temperature has a significant effect on the soot layer dynamics and thus on the wall heat flux to the combustion chamber wall.

Modern electronic engine control systems allow manipulation of many control parameters in order to meet the emissions standards at reasonable fuel consumption. The great number of engine variables lead to very time consuming and expensive studies to determine the optimal combination at each engine operating condition. Compared with the possibilities to control the injection, the quantitative effects of parameter variations on the real processes in a operating combustion chamber and its effects on emissions and fuel consumption are little known. The first part of this paper deals with the problem of optimization of a complex engine control system in a DI-diesel engine. In the second part of this paper a novel optical diagnostic technique is proposed to detect combustion-relevant and controllable parameters such as spray propagation, droplet size and density distribution during injection in a DI-diesel engine combustion chamber.