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Due to the advantages of low weight, low emissions and good fuel economy, downsized turbocharged gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines are widely-applied nowadays. However, Low-Speed Pre-Ignition (LSPI) phenomenon observed in these engines restricts their improvement of performance. Some researchers have shown that auto-ignition of lubricant in the combustion chamber has a great effect on the LSPI frequency. To study the auto-ignition characteristics of lubricant, an innovative single droplet auto-ignition test system for lubricant and its mixture is designed and developed, with better accuracy and effectiveness. The experiments are carried out by hanging lubricant droplets on the thermocouple node under active thermo-atmosphere provided by a small “Dibble burner”. The auto-ignition process of lubricant droplets is recorded by a high-speed camera.

The present work proposed to implement oxy-fuel combustion mode into a homogeneous charge compression ignition engine to reduce complexity in engine emissions after-treatment and lower carbon dioxide emission. The combination of oxy-fuel combustion mode with homogeneous charge compression ignition engine can be further optimized by the utilization of direct high temperature and pressure water injection to improve cycle performance. A retrofitted conventional diesel engine coupled with port fuel injection and direct water injection is utilized in this study. A self-designed oxygen and carbon dioxide mixture intake system with flexible oxygen fraction adjustment ability is implemented in the test bench to simulate the adoption of exhaust gas recirculation. Water injection system is directly installed in the combustion chamber with a modified high speed solenoid diesel injector.

Downsizing gasoline direct injection engine with turbo boost technology is the main trend for gasoline engine. However, with engine downsizing and ever increasing of power output, a new abnormal phenomenon, known as pre-ignition or super knock, occurs in turbocharged engines. Pre-ignition will cause very high in-cylinder pressure and high oscillations. In some circumstances, one cycle of severe pre-ignition may damage the piston or spark plug, which has a severe influence on engine performance and service life. So pre-ignition has raised lots of attention in both industry and academic society. More and more studies reveal that the auto-ignition of lubricants is the potential source for pre-ignition. The auto-ignition characteristics of different lubricants are studied. This paper focuses on the ignition delay of different lubricants in Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) combustion system.

Increasingly stringent emission standards have promoted the interest in alternate fuel sources. Because of the comparable energy density to the existing fossil fuels and renewable production, alcohol fuels may be a suitable replacement, or an additive to the gasoline/diesel fuels to meet the future emission standards with minimal modification to current engine geometry. In this research, the combustion characteristics of neat n-butanol are analyzed under spark ignition operation using a single cylinder SI engine. The fuel is injected into the intake manifold using a port-fuel injector. Two modes of charge dilution were used in this investigation to test the limits of stable engine operation, namely lean burn using excess fresh air and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). The in-cylinder pressure measurement and subsequently, heat release analysis are used to investigate the combustion characteristics of the fuel under low load SI engine operation.

In this study, a spray hot-impingement system was set up to analyze the spray characteristics when spray impinged onto a flat hot surface by high-speed photography technology. The angle between spray axis and normal line of the flat surface could be changed, and the surface temperature could exceed 400°C. The influences of surface temperature and heating power on spray atomization were investigated too. At atmospheric pressure, when the wall temperature was 340∼380°C, the impinging diesel spray was well atomized. In this experiment, the wall heating power could be set at 1∼25 Wcm-2. When the heating power was about 1.6 Wcm-2, the impinging spray atomized well, and when it was about 10.1 Wcm-2 the spray atomized better though the heating power requirement should be high.

In this work, engine tests were performed to realize EGR-enabled LTC on a single-cylinder common-rail diesel engine with three different compression ratios (17.5, 15 and 13:1). The engine performance was first investigated at 17.5:1 compression ratio to provide baseline results, against which all further testing was referenced. The intake boost and injection pressure were progressively increased to ascertain the limiting load conditions for the compression ratio. To extend the engine load range, the compression ratio was then lowered and EGR sweep tests were again carried out. The strength and homogeneity of the cylinder charge were enhanced by using intake boost up to 3 bar absolute and injection pressure up to 180 MPa. The combustion phasing was locked in a narrow crank angle window (5~10° ATDC), during all the tests.

By changing the top-land radial clearance, this paper presents the effect of the piston crevice on the transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle. At the same time, the transient cylinder pressure and instantaneous crankshaft speed of the engine were measured and recorded. The results show that increasing 50% crevice volume leads to 25% increase of HC emissions in the lean region and 18% increase of HC emissions in the rich region, however, the 50% increase of crevice volume contributes to 32% decease of HC emissions in the stable combustion region. For LPG SI engine, the HC emissions of the first firing cycle during cold start are relatively low in a wide range of the excess air ratio.

Heat-release and cylinder pressure based adaptive fuel-injection control tests were performed on a modern common-rail diesel engine to improve the engine operation in the low-temperature combustion (LTC) region. A single shot injection strategy with heavy amount of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) was used to modulate the in-cylinder charge conditions to achieve the low-temperature combustion. Adaptive fuel-injection techniques were used to anchor the cylinder pressure characteristics in the desired crank angle window and thereby stabilize the engine operation. The response of the adaptive control to boost, fueling, and engine speed variations was also tested. A combination of adaptive fuel-injection and automatic boost/back-pressure controls had helped to make the transient emissions comparable to the steady-state LTC emissions.

The effectiveness of after-treatment systems depends on the exhaust gas temperature, which is low during cold-start. As a result, Euro III, Euro IV and FTP75 require that the emissions tests include exhaust from the beginning of cold start. It is proved that 50%∼80% of HC and CO emissions are emitted during the cold start and the amount of unburned fuel from the crevices during starting is much higher than that under warmed engine conditions. The piston crevices is the most part of combustion chamber crevices, and results of mathematical simulations show that the piston crevice contribution to HC emissions is expected to increase during cold engine operation. Based on the transient HC test data and the double zone combustion model, this paper presents the study of the crevice HC Mechanism of the first firing cycle at cold start on an LPG SI Engine. A fast-response flame ionization detector (FFID) was employed to measure transient HC emissions of the first firing cycle.

A number of cylinder-pressure derived parameters including the crank angles of maximum pressure, maximum rate of pressure rise, and 50% heat released are considered as among the desired feedback for cycle-by-cycle adaptive control of diesel combustion. For real-time computation of these parameters, the heat release analyses based on the first law of thermodynamics are used. This paper intends to identify the operating regions where the simplified heat release approach provides sufficient accuracy for control applications and also highlights those regions where its use can lead to significant errors in the calculated parameters. The effects of the cylinder charge-to-wall heat transfer and the temperature dependence of the specific heat ratio on the model performance are reported. A new computationally efficient algorithm for estimating the crank angle of 50% heat released with adequate accuracy is proposed for computation in real-time.

Diesel engines operating in the low-temperature combustion (LTC) mode generally tend to produce very low levels of NOx and soot. However, the implementation of LTC is challenged by the higher cycle-to-cycle variation with heavy EGR operation and the narrower operating corridors. The robustness and efficiency of LTC operation in diesel engines can be enhanced with improvements in the promptness and accuracy of combustion control. A set of field programmable gate array (FPGA) modules were coded and interlaced to suffice on-the-fly combustion event modulations. The cylinder pressure traces were analyzed to update the heat release rate concurrently as the combustion process proceeds prior to completing an engine cycle. Engine dynamometer tests demonstrated that such prompt heat release analysis was effective to optimize the LTC and the split combustion events for better fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions.

This paper presents the simulation of in-cylinder stratified mixture formation, spray motion, combustion and emissions in a four-stroke and four valves direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine with a pent-roof combustion chamber by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The Extended Coherent Flame Combustion Model (ECFM), implemented in the AVL-Fire codes, was employed. The key parameters of spray characteristics related to computing settings, such as skew angle, cone angle and flow per pulse width with experimental measurements were compared. The numerical analysis is mainly focused on how the tumble flow ratio and geometry of piston bowls affect the motion of charge/spray in-cylinder, the formation of stratified mixture and the combustion and emissions (NO and CO₂) for the wall-guided stratified-charge spark-ignition DISI engine.

Common-rail fuel systems have been recognized as an effective means to shape the heat release rate. In this paper measured cylinder pressure and fuel injection data for a common-rail diesel engine were analyzed to develop an empirical heat release rate model. A set of discrete Wiebe functions, one to describe the pilot injection combustion and the other to describe the main injection combustion, have been proposed to model the heat release data. The coefficients in the model were adjusted to match the observed heat release diagram. An expression for ignition delay for pilot injection and main injection has also been suggested for test conditions.

This paper presents an experimental study of the emission characteristics of a small Spark-Ignited, LPG engine. A single cylinder, four-stroke, water-cooled, 125cc SI engine for motorcycle is modified for using LPG fuel. The power output of LPG is above 95% power output of gasoline. The emission characteristics of LPG are compared with the gasoline. The test result shows that LPG for small SI engine will help to reduce the emission level of motorcycles. The HC and CO emission level can be reduced greatly, but NOx emissions are increased. The emission of motorcycle using LPG shows the potential to meet the more strict regulation.

Taking advantages of high speed RGB video cameras, the two-color method can be implemented with a relatively simple setup to obtain the temporal development of the two dimensional temperature and soot (KL) distributions in a reacting diesel jet. However, several issues such as the selection of the two wavelengths, the role of bandpass filters, and the proper optical settings, etc. should be known to obtain a reliable measurement. This paper, at first, discusses about the uncertainties in the measurement of temperature and KL distributions in the diesel flame by the two-color method using the high speed RGB video camera. Since n-butanol, as an alternative renewable fuel, has the potential application in diesel engines, the characteristic of spray combustion of diesel-butanol blends under the diesel-like ambient conditions in a pre-burning constant-volume combustion chamber is studied.

The present work aims at optimizing diesel engine combustion efficiency with optimized water injection strategy. The engine had been modified based on a two-cylinder mechanical pump diesel engine into common rail diesel engine with capability of direct water injection. The direct water injection system was designed and manufactured independently. An air-fluid booster was utilized to establish the water injection pressure up to 40MPa. Customized diesel injector was selected to be used as water injector in this study. Water injection strategy was optimized in detail with injection timing around TDC which ranges from 12°CA BTDC to -5°CA BTDC under 10 bar IMEP. The engine efficiency can be improved under selected water injection strategy due to the increment of work fluid in the combustion chamber. Moreover, the nitric oxides emissions show decrement around 10%.

Research studies have suggested that changes to the ignition system are required to generate a more robust flame kernel in order to secure the ignition process for the future advanced high efficiency spark-ignition (SI) engines. In a typical inductive ignition system, the spark discharge is initiated by a transient high-power electrical breakdown and sustained by a relatively low-power glow process. The electrical breakdown is characterized as a capacitive discharge process with a small quantity of energy coming mainly from the gap parasitic capacitor. Enhancement of the breakdown is a potential avenue effectively for extending the lean limit of SI engine. In this work, the effect of high-power capacitive spark discharge on the early flame kernel growth of premixed methane-air mixtures is investigated through electrical probing and optical diagnosis.

A segment of steel tube with the inner diameter of 60 mm and length of 100 mm was fixed between the intake manifold and cylinder head in a direct injection natural aspirated diesel engine. The surface of the tube could be heated to be above 400 °C by the heater enwrapped outside within several minutes under the power less than 600 W. The tip of an injector traditionally used for in-cylinder diesel direct injection was extended to the axis of the tube. The diesel sprays could impinge onto the hot inner surface of the tube and atomize quickly if the temperature of the tube was high enough. Then the fuel-air mixture would be sucked into the cylinder, and HCCI combustion could be fulfilled. The vaporization ratio of the impinged diesel sprays was estimated by fuel consumption, intake air flux and excess air coefficient (λ) calculated from the volumetric concentration of O2, CO2 and CO emissions. The NOx emission was always very low.

Spray characteristics and spray wall-impingement events are the key factors for the direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines, affecting fuel/air mixture preparation and its combustion process. Thus, the spray characteristics of a multi-hole injector for DISI engines, such as spray tip penetration and spray cone angle were investigated in an optical chamber employing the high-speed shadow photography. Furthermore, the effects of the injection pressure, ambient pressure and piston top shape on the impinging spray development were studied in the optical chamber, when the impinging distance is 26.1 mm, corresponding to about 60 CAD ATDC. In addition, the SMD and wall film thickness of the spray impinging on the piston top were studied by means of CFD technique. The results showed that the ambient pressure had the greater effect on the changes of the spray penetration and spray cone angle than the injection pressure.

In order to meet the ever more stringent demands on the CO2 emission reduction, downsized modern gasoline engine with highly boosted turbo charger meets new challenges such as super knock and pre-ignition, which will influence the engine combustion efficiency, smooth operation and even cause mechanical failure. A spark plug type ion current detection sensor was used in a 1.8L turbo charged gasoline engine. The ion-current wave signal differed greatly under different engine operating conditions such as without knock, with knock of different knock intensities. The frequency spectrum of ion-current was also studied, by the method of discrete Fourier transform (DFT). In knocking cycles, there were fluctuations of frequency 8-13 kHz both in the combustion pressure signal and in the ion current signal, proving the existence of knock information.