Search Results

Combustion and emission characteristics of diesel and biodiesel blends (soybean methyl ester) were studied in a single-cylinder Direct Injection (DI) engine at different loads and a constant speed. The results show that NOx emission and fuel consumption are increased with increasing biodiesel percentage. Reduction of smoke opacity is significant at higher loads with a higher biodiesel ratio. Compared with the baseline diesel fuel, B20 (20% biodiesel) has a slight increase of NOx emission and similar fuel consumption. Smoke emission of B20 is close to that of diesel fuel. Results of combustion analysis indicate that start of combustion (SOC) for biodiesel blends is earlier than that for diesel. Higher biodiesel percentage results in earlier SOC. Earlier SOC for biodiesel blends is due to advanced injection timing from higher density and bulk modulus and lower ignition delay from higher cetane number.

The combustion of dual-fuel engines usually uses a pilot flame to burn out a background fuel inside a cylinder under high compression. The background fuel can be either a gaseous fuel or a volatile liquid fuel, commonly with low reactivity to prevent premature combustion and engine knocking; whereas the pilot flame is normally set off with the direct injection of a liquid fuel with adequate reactivity that is suitable for deterministic auto-ignition with a high compression ratio. In this work, directly injected butanol is used to generate the pilot flame, while intake port injected ethanol or butanol is employed as the background fuel. Compared with the conventional diesel-only combustion, dual-fuel operations not only broaden the fuel applicability, but also enhance the potential for clean combustion, in high efficiency engines. The amount of background fuel and the scheduling of pilot flame are investigated through extensive laboratory experiments.

This paper examines the diesel-ethanol dual fuel combustion at medium engine loads on a single-cylinder research diesel engine with a compression ratio of 16.5:1. The effect of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and ethanol energy ratio was investigated for the dual fuel combustion to achieve simultaneously ultra-low NOx and soot emissions. A medium ethanol ratio of about 0.6 was found suitable to meet the requirements for mixing enhancement and ignition control, which resulted in the lowest NOx and soot emissions among the tested ethanol ratios. A double-pilot injection strategy was found competent to lower the pressure rise rate owing to the reduced fuel quantity in the close-to-TDC injection. The advancement of pilot injection timing tended to reduce the CO and THC emissions, which is deemed beneficial for high EGR operations. The reactivity mutual-modulation between the diesel pilot and the background ethanol mixture was identified.

Based on a 125cm3 single cylinder SI engine, the designated idle speed was controlled by adjusting of cycle ignition advance angle. By analyzing the effects of different idle speed and throttle open position on three way catalyst (TWC) light-off time and conversion efficiency of HC and CO emissions, combined with the corresponding total HC and CO emissions level, the optimum idle speed and throttle open position at engine's warm-up phase were found by the matching optimum. The present method for engine control strategy is helpful to optimize the warm-up phase emission levels in SI engine with LPG fuel.

Owing to the stochastic nature of engine knock, determination of the knock limited spark angle (KLSA) is difficult in engine cycle simulation. Therefore, the state-of-the-art knock modeling is mostly limited to either merely predicting knock onset (i.e. auto-ignition of end gas) or combining a simple unburned mass fraction (UMF) model representative of knock intensity (KI). In this study, a newly developed KLSA model, which takes both predictions of knock onset and intensity into account, is firstly introduced. Multiple variables including the excess air ratio, EGR ratio, cylinder pressure and the end gas temperature are included in the knock onset model. Based on the auto-ignition theory of hot spots in end gas, both the energy density and heat release rate in hot spots are taken into consideration in the KI model.

The control of combustion phasing in homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion is investigated with neat n-butanol in this work. HCCI is a commonly researched combustion mode, owing to its improved thermal efficiency over conventional gasoline combustion, as well as its lower nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter emissions compared to those of diesel combustion. Despite these advantages, HCCI lacks successful widespread implementation with conventional fuels, primarily due to the lack of effective combustion phasing control. In this preliminary study, chemical kinetic simulations are conducted to study the auto-ignition characteristics of n-butanol under varied background pressures, temperatures, and dilution levels using established mechanisms in CHEMKIN software. Increasing the pressure or temperature lead to a shorter ignition delay, whereas increasing the dilution by the application of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) leads to a longer ignition delay.

European standards have set stringent PN (particle number) regulation (6×1011 #/km) for gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine, posing a great challenge for the particulate emission control of GDI engines. Dual-injection, which combines direct-injection (DI) with port-fuel-injection (PFI), is an effective approach to reduce particle emissions of GDI engine while maintaining good efficiency and power output. In order to investigate the PN emission characteristics under different dual-injection strategies, a DMS500 fast particle spectrometer was employed to characterize the effects of injection strategies on particulates emissions from a dual-injection gasoline engine. In this study, the injection strategies include injection timing, injection ratio and injection pressure of direct-injection.