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Negative valve overlap (NVO) is an operating mode that enables efficient, low-temperature gasoline combustion in automotive engines. In addition to retaining a large fraction of residuals, NVO operation also enables partial fuel injection during the recompression period as a means of enhancing and controlling main combustion. Thermal effects of NVO fueling on main combustion are well understood, but chemical effects of the products of NVO reactions remain uncertain. To address this topic, we have fabricated a dump valve that extracts a large fraction of cylinder charge at intake valve closing (IVC), yielding a representative sample of NVO products mixed with intake air. Sample composition is determined by gas chromatography. Results from a sweep of NVO start-of-injection (SOI) timings show that concentrations of the reactive species acetylene and hydrogen rise to several hundred parts-per-million as NVO SOI is retarded toward top center of NVO.

A flamelet model is used to calculate combustion in a diesel engine, and the results are compared to experimental data available from an optically accessible, direct-injection diesel research engine. The 3∼D time-dependent Kiva-II code is used for the calculations, the standard Arrhenius combustion model being replaced by an ignition model and the coherent flame model for turbulent combustion. The ignition model is a four-step mechanism developed for heavy hydrocarbons which has been previously used for diesel combustion. The turbulent combustion model is a flamelet model developed from the basic ideas of Marble and Broadwell. This model considers local regions of the turbulent flame front as interfaces called flamelets which separate fuel and oxidizer in the case of a diffusion flame. These flamelets are accounted for by solving a transport equation for the flame surface density, i.e., the flame area per unit volume.

Refinements were made to a post-processing technique, termed the Thermal Stratification Analysis (TSA), that couples the mass fraction burned data to ignition timing predictions from the autoignition integral to calculate an apparent temperature distribution from an experimental HCCI data point. Specifically, the analysis is expanded to include all of the mass in the cylinder by fitting the unburned mass with an exponential function, characteristic of the wall-affected region. The analysis-derived temperature distributions are then validated in two ways. First, the output data from CFD simulations are processed with the Thermal Stratification Analysis and the calculated temperature distributions are compared to the known CFD distributions.