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Hydrogen–diesel dual-fuel combustion processes were visualized using an optically accessible rapid compression and expansion machine (RCEM). A hydrogen-air mixture was introduced into the combustion chamber, and a pilot injection of diesel fuel was used as the ignition source. A small amount of diesel fuel was injected as the pilot fuel at injection pressures of 40, 80, and 120 MPa using a common rail injection system. The injection amounts of diesel fuel were varied as 3, 6, and 13 mm3. The amount of hydrogen was manipulated by varying the total excess air ratio (λtotal) at 3 and 4. The RCEM was operated at a constant speed of 900 rpm, and the in-cylinder pressure and temperature at the top dead center (TDC) were set as 5 MPa and 700 K, respectively. The combustion processes were visualized via direct photography and hydroxyl (OH*) chemiluminescence photography using a high-speed camera and an image intensifier.

Ammonia is a promising alternative to conventional fossil fuels for internal combustion engines, especially in the maritime industry, because it does not emit carbon dioxide. Since redundancy is important in marine engines, a dual fuel system with diesel oil is currently widely applied to use alternative fuels such as liquefied natural gas, and a similar system is expected for ammonia-fueled ships. However, ammonia has low ignitability and low burning speed, hence improvement of combustion efficiency is major challenge. In addition, the emission of N2O which has a high global warming effect is also problematic as well as emission of NOX as air pollutant. To overcome these challenges, a mixing with hydrogen, which has high ignitability and high burning speed, can be effective. Therefore, in this study, combustion and emission characteristics of tri-fuel combustion engines, in which ammonia and hydrogen-air mixture is ignited by μ-pilot injection of diesel oil, were investigated.

Ammonia is well known as one of the promising substitute energy sources for fossil fuels, but it has some disadvantages such as low ignitability and low burning speed. Co-combustion with diesel fuel can compensate for its disadvantages and enable the application of the ammonia as a main fuel for internal combustion engines. In this study, the effects of ammonia/diesel mixing ratio and excess air ratio on combustion and emission characteristics have been investigated by internal combustion engine test and numerical approach. In the engine test, it was found that the ammonia/diesel mixing ratio and excess air ratio have a large effect on the heat release rate and emissions of nitrogen monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, unburned ammonia, and nitrous oxide. High ammonia mixing ratio leads to the aforementioned emissions, but these emissions were reduced in stoichiometric conditions compared to lean conditions.

We propose a novel dual-fuel combustion model for simulating heavy-duty engines with the G-Equation. Dual-Fuel combustion strategies in such engines features direct injection of a high-reactivity fuel into a lean, premixed chamber which has a high resistance to autoignition. Distinct combustion modes are present: the DI fuel auto-ignites following chemical ignition delay after spray vaporization and mixing; a reactive front is formed on its surroundings; it develops into a well-structured turbulent flame, which propagates within the premixed charge. Either direct chemistry or the flame-propagation approach (G- Equation), taken alone, do not produce accurate results. The proposed Dual-Fuel model decides what regions of the combustion chamber should be simulated with either approach, according to the local flame state; and acts as a “kernel” model for the G- Equation model. Direct chemistry is run in the regions where a premixed front is not present.

Spray-wall interactions in diesel engines have a strong influence on turbulent flow evolution and mixing, which influences the engine’s thermal efficiency and pollutant-emissions behavior. Previous optical experiments and numerical investigations of a stepped-lip diesel piston bowl focused on how spray-wall interactions influence the formation of squish-region vortices and their sensitivity to injection timing. Such vortices are stronger and longer-lived at retarded injection timings and are correlated with faster late-cycle heat release and soot reductions, but are weaker and shorter-lived as injection timing is advanced. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations predict that piston bowls with more space in the squish region can enhance the strength of these vortices at near-TDC injection timings, which is hypothesized to further improve peak thermal efficiency and reduce emissions. The dimpled stepped-lip (DSL) piston is such a design.

G-Equation models represent propagating flame fronts with an implicit two-dimensional surface representation (level-set). Level-set methods are fast, as transport source terms for the implicit surface can be solved with finite-volume operators on the finite-volume domain, without having to build the actual surface. However, they include approximations whose practical effects are not properly understood. In this study, we improved the numerics of the FRESCO CFD code’s G-Equation solver and developed a new method to simulate kernel growth using signed distance functions and the analytical sphere-mesh overlap. We analyzed their role for simulating propane/air flames, using three well-established constant-volume configurations: a one-dimensional, freely propagating laminar flame; a disc-shaped, constant-volume swirl combustor; and torch-jet flame development through an orifice from a two-chamber device.

Recent research on thermal reciprocating engines has focused on the influence of lubricant oil on the combustion process, which can lead to highly undesired super-knock events. Low-Speed Pre-Ignition (LSPI) events severely limit the further development of Direct Injection Spark Ignition Engines (DISI), preventing high efficiencies from being achieved. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about the fundamental mechanisms leading to LSPI, due to the complex phenomena involved and the interaction between lubricant oil and fuel. Understanding how the presence of lubricant oil traces affects gasoline chemical reactivity is an essential step for performing successful numerical simulations aimed at predicting the onset of LSPI phenomena. Reaction mechanisms able to predict oil-fuel interaction have been proposed, but they are computationally demanding.

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.

Lagrangian spray modeling represents a critical boundary condition for multidimensional simulations of in-cylinder flow structure, mixture formation and combustion in internal combustion engines. Segregated models for injection, breakup, collision and vaporization are usually employed to pass appropriate momentum, mass, and energy source terms to the gas-phase solver. Careful calibration of each sub-model generally produces appropriate results. Yet, the predictiveness of this modeling approach has been questioned by recent experimental observations, which showed that at trans- and super-critical conditions relevant to diesel injection, classical atomization and vaporization behavior is replaced by a mixing-controlled phase transition process of a dense fluid. In this work, we assessed the shortcomings of classical spray modeling with respect to real-gas and phase-change behavior, employing a multicomponent phase equilibrium solver and liquid-jet theory.

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.

Sector mesh modeling is the dominant computational approach for combustion system design optimization. The aim of this work is to quantify the errors descending from the sector mesh approach through three geometric modeling approaches to an optical diesel engine. A full engine geometry mesh is created, including valves and intake and exhaust ports and runners, and a full-cycle flow simulation is performed until fired TDC. Next, an axisymmetric sector cylinder mesh is initialized with homogeneous bulk in-cylinder initial conditions initialized from the full-cycle simulation. Finally, a 360-degree azimuthal mesh of the cylinder is initialized with flow and thermodynamics fields at IVC mapped from the full engine geometry using a conservative interpolation approach. A study of the in-cylinder flow features until TDC showed that the geometric features on the cylinder head (valve tilt and protrusion into the combustion chamber, valve recesses) have a large impact on flow complexity.

The long-term goal of this work is to develop a conceptual model for multiple injections of diesel jets. The current work contributes to that effort by performing a detailed modeling investigation into mechanisms that are predicted to control 1st and 2nd stage ignition in single-pulse diesel (n-dodecane) jets under different conditions. One condition produces a jet with negative ignition dwell that is dominated by mixing-controlled heat release, and the other, a jet with positive ignition dwell and dominated by premixed heat release. During 1st stage ignition, fuel is predicted to burn similarly under both conditions; far upstream, gases at the radial-edge of the jet, where gas temperatures are hotter, partially react and reactions continue as gases flow downstream. Once beyond the point of complete fuel evaporation, near-axis gases are no longer cooled by the evaporation process and 1st stage ignition transitions to 2nd stage ignition.

Engine experiments have revealed the importance of fuel condensation on the emission characteristics of low temperature combustion. However, direct in-cylinder experimental evidence has not been reported in the literature. In this paper, the in-cylinder condensation processes observed in optically accessible engine experiments are first illustrated. The observed condensation processes are then simulated using state-of-the-art multidimensional engine CFD simulations with a phase transition model that incorporates a well-validated phase equilibrium numerical solver, in which a thermodynamically consistent phase equilibrium analysis is applied to determine when mixtures become unstable and a new phase is formed. The model utilizes fundamental thermodynamics principles to judge the occurrence of phase separation or combination by minimizing the system Gibbs free energy.

Surface film formation is an important phenomenon during spray impingement in a combustion chamber. The film that forms on the chamber walls and piston bowl produces soot post-combustion. While some droplets stick to the wall surface, others splash and interact with the gas present inside the combustion chamber. Accurate prediction of both the film thickness and splashed mass is crucial for surface film model development since it leads to a precise estimation of the amount of soot and other exhaust gases formed. This information could guide future studies aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the combustion process and might enable development of engines with reduced emissions. Dynamic structure Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence model implemented for in-cylinder sprays [1] has shown to predict the flow structure of a spray more accurately than the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes turbulence model.

In most large-eddy simulation (LES) applications to two-phase engine flows, the liquid-air interactions need to be accounted for as source terms in the respective governing equations. Accurate calculation of these source terms requires the relative velocity “seen” by liquid droplets as they move across the flow, which generally needs to be estimated using a turbulent dispersion model. Turbulent dispersion modeling in LES is very scarce in the literature. In most studies on engine spray flows, sub-grid scale (SGS) models for the turbulent dispersion still follow the same stochastic approach originally proposed for Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS). In this study, an SGS dispersion model is formulated in which the instantaneous gas velocity is decomposed into a deterministic part and a stochastic part. The deterministic part is reconstructed using the approximate deconvolution method (ADM), in which the large-scale flow can be readily calculated.

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.

To meet stringent emissions regulations, filtration devices are often used in engine exhaust systems to reduce particulate mass (PM) and particulate number (PN). Diesel particulate filters (DPFs) are a well-established means of reducing PM from diesel engines to meet emissions regulations. New emissions regulations will most likely require a similar technology on gasoline engines with direct injection, gasoline particulate filters (GPFs). Due to differences in the exhaust and particulate characteristics, the design and operation of GPFs and DPFs differ. In a DPF filtration is dominated by the buildup of a soot cake. Whereas in a GPF, much of the soot is trapped inside the porous substrate, or filter wall, where deep-bed filtration is dominant. Thus, an accurate model describing the porous filtration properties of GPF substrates is desired. The pore filtration model (PFM) was developed to more accurately model the deep-bed filtration process that occurs in a GPF.

A swept-volume method of calculating the volume swept by the flame during each time step is developed and used to improve the calculation of fuel reaction rates. The improved reaction rates have been applied to the ignition model and coupled with the level set G-equation combustion model. In the ignition model, a single initial kernel is formed after which the kernel is convected by the gas flow and its growth rate is determined by the flame speed and thermal expansion due to the energy transfer from the electrical circuit. The predicted ignition kernel size was compared with the available experimental data and good agreements were achieved. Once the ignition kernel reaches a size when the fully turbulent flame is developed, the G-equation model is switched on to track the mean turbulent flame front propagation.

Modeling ignition kernel development in spark ignition engines is crucial to capturing the sources of cyclic variability, both with RANS and LES simulations. Appropriate kernel modeling must ensure that energy transfer from the electrodes to the gas phase has the correct timing, rate and locations, until the flame surface is large enough to be represented on the mesh by the G-Equation level-set method. However, in most kernel models, geometric details driving kernel growth are missing: either because it is described as Lagrangian particles, or because its development is simplified, i.e., down to multiple spherical flames. This paper covers the geometric aspects of kernel development, which makes up the core of a Triangulated Lagrangian Ignition Kernel model. One (or multiple, if it restrikes) spark channel is initialized as a one-dimensional Lagrangian particle thread.