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Impingement of jet-to-jet has been found to give improved spray penetration characteristics and higher vaporization rates when compared to multi-hole outwardly injecting fuel injectors which are commonly used in the gasoline engine. The current work studies a non-reacting spray by using a 5-hole impinging-jet style direct-injection injector. The jet-to-jet collision induced by the inwardly opening nozzles of the multi-hole injector produces rapid and short jet breakup which is fundamentally different from how conventional fuel injectors operate. A non-reacting spray study is performed using a 5-hole impinging jet injector and a traditional 6-hole Bosch Hochdruck-Einspritzventil (HDEV)-5 gasoline direct-injection (GDI) injector with gasoline as a fuel injected at 172 bar pressure with ambient temperature of 653 K and 490 K and ambient pressure of 37.4 bar and 12.4 bar.

This is the second part of a study on using port water injection to quantifiably enhance the knock performance of fuels. In the United States, the metric used to quantify the anti-knock performance of fuels is Anti Knock Index (AKI), which is the average of Research Octane Number (RON) and Motor Octane Number (MON). Fuels with higher AKI are expected to have better knock mitigating properties, enabling the engine to run closer to Maximum Brake Torque (MBT) spark timing in the knock limited region. The work done in part I of the study related increased knock tolerance due to water injection to increased fuel AKI, thus establishing an ‘effective AKI’ due to water injection. This paper builds upon the work done in part I of the study by repeating a part of the test matrix with Primary Reference Fuels (PRFs), with iso-octane (PRF100) as the reference fuel and lower PRFs used to match its performance with the help of port water injection.

Anti-knock index (AKI) is a metric that can be used to quantify the anti-knock performance of a fuel and is the metric used in the United States. AKI is the average of Research Octane Number (RON) and Motor Octane Number (MON), which are calculated for every fuel on a Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine under controlled conditions according to ASTM test procedures. Fuels with higher AKI have better knock mitigating properties and can be run with a combustion phasing closer to MBT in the knock limited operating region of a gasoline engine. However, fuels with higher AKI tend to be costlier and less environmentally friendly to produce. As an alternative, the anti-knock characteristics of lower AKI fuels can be improved with water injection. In this sense, the water injection increases the ‘effective AKI’ of the fuel.