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An ongoing research and development activities on the scavenged pre-chamber ignition system for an automotive natural gas fueled engine is presented in this paper. The experimental works have been performed in engine laboratory at steady state conditions on a gas engine with 102 mm bore and 120 mm stroke, converted to a single cylinder engine. The in-house designed scavenged pre-chamber is equipped with a spark plug, fuel supply and a miniature pressure sensor for detailed combustion diagnostics. The engine was operated at constant speed, fully open throttle valve and four different fueling modes with or without spark discharge. A partly motored mode allowed direct evaluation of the pre-chamber heat release. The experimental data acquired in this research served as a validation data for the numerical simulations. The performed tests of prototypes and calculations have recently been expanded to include 3-D flow calculations in the Ansys Fluent software.

In this article the development of a combustion system with a fuel-scavenged pre-chamber is described. Such a system is commonly used in large-bore engines operated with extremely lean mixtures. The authors implemented the scavenged pre-chamber into a light duty truck-size engine with a bore of 102 mm. The lean burn strategy is intended to achieve very low nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions at low load. At full load a stoichiometric mixture strategy is applied to achieve sufficient power density while simultaneously enabling the use of a relatively simple three-way catalytic converter for exhaust gas aftertreatment. This work outlines the pre-chamber design features and introduces the results of an experimental investigation of the effect of pre-chamber ignition on a single cylinder testing engine.