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Plug-in electric vehicle (PHEV) has a promising prospect to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and optimize engine operating in high-efficiency region. According to the maximum electric power and all-electric range, PHEVs are divided into two categories, including “all-electric PHEV” and “blended PHEV” and the latter provides a potential for more rational energy distribution because engine participates in vehicle driving during aggressive acceleration not just by motor. However, the frequent use of engine may result in severe emissions especially in low state of charge (SOC) and ahead of catalyst light-off. This study quantitatively investigates the impact of oil viscosity and driving mode (hybrid/conventional) on oil dilution and emissions including particle number (PN).

Polyoxymethylene Dimethyl Ether (PODEn) is a promising green additive to diesel fuel, owing to the unique chemical structure (CH3O[CH2O]nCH3, n≥2) and high cetane number. Together with the general wide-distillation fuel (WDF), which has an attractive potential to reduce the cost of production of vehicle fuel, the oxygenated WDF with PODEn can help achieve a high efficiency and low emissions of soot, NOx, HC, and CO simultaneously. In this paper, the first detailed reaction mechanism (225 species, 1082 reactions) which can describe the ignition characteristics of PODE1 and PODE3 at low temperature was developed.

Wide Distillation Fuel (WDF) refers to the fuels with a distillation range from Initial Boiling Point (IBP) of gasoline to Final Boiling Point (FBP) of diesel. Polyoxymethylene Dimethyl Ethers (PODEn) have high oxygen content and cetane number, are promising green additive to diesel fuel. In this paper, WDF was prepared by blending diesel and gasoline at ratio of 1:1, by volume; the mass distribution of oligomers in the PODE3-4 product was 88.9% of PODE3 and 8.46% of PODE4. Diesel fuel (Diesel), WDF (G50D50) and WDF (80%)-PODE3-4 (20%) (G40D40P20) were tested in a light-duty single-cylinder diesel engine, combustion characteristic, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions were measured. The results showed that: at idling condition, G40D40P20 has better combustion stability, higher heat release rate, higher thermal efficiency compared with G50D50.

Multi-mode combustion is an ideal combustion strategy to utilize HCCI for internal combustion engines. It combines HCCI combustion mode for low-middle load and traditional SI mode for high load and high speed. By changing the cam profiles from normal overlap for SI mode to the negative valve overlap (NVO) for HCCI mode, as well as the adjustment of direct injection strategy, the combustion mode transition between SI and HCCI was realized in one engine cycle. By two-step cam switch, the throttle action is separated from the cam action, which ensures the stabilization of mode transition. For validating the feasibility of the stepped switch, the influence of throttle position on HCCI combustion was carefully studied. Based on the research, the combustion mode switch was realized in one engine cycle; the whole switch process including throttle action was realized in 10 cycles. The entire process was smooth, rapid and reliable without any abnormal combustion such as knocking and misfiring.

In this paper, a hybrid combustion mode in four-stroke gasoline direct injection engines was studied. Switching cam profiles and injection strategies simultaneously was adopted to obtain a rapid and smooth switch between SI mode and HCCI mode. Based on the continuous pressure traces and corresponding emissions, HCCI steady operation, HCCI transient process (combustion phase adjustment, SI-HCCI, HCCI-SI, HCCI cold start) were studied. In HCCI mode, HCCI combustion phase can be adjusted rapidly by changing the split injection ratio. The HCCI control strategies had been demonstrated in a Chery GDI2.0 engine. The HCCI engine simulation results show that, oxygen and active radicals are stored due to negative valve overlap and split fuel injection under learn burn condition. This reduces the HCCI sensitivity on inlet boundary conditions, such as intake charge and intake temperature. The engine can be run from 1500rpm to 4000rpm in HCCI mode without spark ignition.

Polyoxymethylene dimethyl ethers (PODEn) are promising alternative fuel candidates for diesel engines because they present advantages in soot reduction. This study uses a PODEn mixture (contains PODE3-6) from mass production to provide oxygen component in blend fuels. The spray combustion of PODEn-diesel bend fuels in a constant volume vessel was studied using high speed imaging, PLII-LEM and OH* chemiluminescence. Fuels of several blend ratios are compared with pure diesel. Flame luminance data show a near linear decrease tendency with the blend ratio increasing. The OH* images reveal that the ignition positions of all the cases have small differences, which indicates that using a low PODEn blend ratio of no more than 30% does not need significant adjustment in engine combustion control strategies. It is found that 30% PODEn blended with diesel (P30) can effectively reduce the total soot by approximately 68% in comparison with pure diesel.

With increasingly stringent requirements and regulations related to particulate matter(PM) emissions, manufacturers are paying more and more attention to emissions from gasoline direct injection(GDI) engines. The present paper proposes an improved two-step soot model. The model is applied in the Kiva-Chemkin program to simulate the processes of spray impinging, fuel mixture preparation, combustion and soot formation in a typical turbocharged downsized GDI engine. The simulation results show that soot formation in the GDI engine is attributed to non-uniform distribution of the air-fuel mixture and pool fire of wall film in the cylinder. Under homogeneous mode, increasing the injection advance angle can optimize fuel atomization and improve air-fuel mixing, thus reducing soot formation. However, an excessive injection advance angle may cause spray to impinge on the cylinder wall and this will sharply increase the soot emission.

In this paper blends of diesel and gasoline (dieseline) fuelled Partially Premixed Compression Ignition (PPCI) combustion and the comparison to conventional diesel combustion is investigated. The tests are carried out using a light duty four cylinder Euro IV diesel engine. The engine condition is maintained at 1800 rpm, 52 Nm (equivalent IMEP around 4.3 bar). Different injection timings and different amounts of EGR are used to achieve the PPCI combustion. The results show that compared to the conventional diesel combustion, the smoke and NOx emissions can be reduced by more than 95% simultaneously with dieseline fuelled PPCI combustion. The particle number total concentration can be reduced by 90% as well as the mean diameter (from 54 nm for conventional diesel to 16 nm for G50 fuelled PPCI). The penalty is a slightly increased noise level and lower indicated efficiency, which is decreased from 40% to 38.5%.

Wide Distillation Fuel (WDF), with a distillation range from Initial Boiling Point of gasoline to Final Boiling Point of diesel, can be easily gained directly by blending diesel with gasoline. However, the reduced auto-ignitability of WDF could lead to higher HC emissions. Polyoxymethylene Dimethyl Ethers (PODE), with good volatility and oxygen content of up to 49%, have great potential to improve combustion and emission characteristics, especially for soot reduction. Experiments were carried out in a light-duty four-cylinder diesel engine fueled with neat diesel, gasoline/diesel blends (GD), GD/PODE blends (GDP) and the combustion and emission characteristics were carefully examined. Results showed that GDP had the lowest PM emission and diesel had the poorest one among the three fuels. Due to the addition of gasoline and the relatively poor ignitability, GD had lower combustion efficiency and higher Soluble Organic Fraction (SOF) emissions than diesel.

HCCI combustion was studied in a 4-stroke gasoline engine with a direct injection system. The electronically controlled two-stage gasoline injection and spark ignition system were adopted to control the mixture formation, ignition timing and combustion rate in HCCI engine. The engine could be operated in HCCI combustion mode in a range of load from 1 to 5 bar IMEP and operated in SI combustion mode up to load of 8 bar IMEP. The HCCI combustion characteristics were investigated under different A/F ratios, engine speeds, starts of injection, as well as spark ignition enabled or not. The test results reveal the HCCI combustion features as a high-pressure gradient after ignition and has advantages in high thermal efficiency and low NOx emissions over SI combustion. At the part load of 1400rpm and IMEP of 3.5bar, ISFC in HCCI mode is 25% lower and NOx emissions is 95% lower than that in SI mode.

In order to enhance the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines, a combustion mode namely Homogeneous Charge Induced Ignition (HCII) was introduced and examined in this paper. Port-injected gasoline was used as the main fuel and formed a homogeneous charge in the cylinder. Diesel was used as the pilot fuel, directly injected into the cylinder, and self-ignited and this induced the ignition of the premixed gasoline-air charge. The images of HCII combustion process were taken on an optical engine through a high-speed CMOS camera. The multi-point induced ignition phenomena were observed and the parameters like flame luminance, ignition delay and combustion duration were analyzed by image analysis. The result shows that as the gasoline/diesel ratio increases with a fixed low pilot amount, the ignition delay increases, the initial ignition area extends from the center towards the periphery of the combustion chamber, and the combustion velocity increased.

Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines developed at nineties of the twentieth century can greatly improve the fuel economy. But the combustion chamber design and mixture control of the engines are very complex compared with Port Fuel Injection (PFI) gasoline engines. A two-stage gasoline direct injection (TSGDI) combustion system is developed and aimed to solve the problem of the complexity. Two-stage fuel injection and flexible injection timings are adopted as main means to form reasonable stratified mixture in the cylinder. A simple combustion chamber and helical intake port are designed to assist the mixture's stable combustion, which reduces the difficulties of the combustion system design. Systematical simulation and experimental studies of the effects of injection strategies such as different first,second injection timings and injection ratios, on the mixture formation processes and engine performanc are made in detail.

Polyoxymethylene dimethyl ethers (PODEn) have high cetane number, high oxygen content and high volatility, therefore can be added to gasoline to optimize the performance and soot emission of Gasoline Compression Ignition (GCI) combustion. High speed imaging was used to investigate the spray and combustion process of gasoline/PODEn blends (PODEn volume fraction 0%-30%) under various ambient conditions and injection strategies in a constant volume vessel. Results showed that with an increase of PODEn proportion from 10% to 30%, liquid-phase penetration of the spray increased slightly, ignition delay decreased from 3.8 ms to 2.0 ms and flame lift off length decreased 29.4%, causing a significant increase of the flame luminance. For blends with 20% PODEn, when ambient temperature decreased from 893 K to 823 K, the ignition delay increased 1.3 ms and the flame luminance got lower.

A 1-Dimensional (1-D) model of fluid dynamic and chemistry kinetics following hot spot auto-ignition has been developed to simulate the process from auto-ignition to pressure wave propagation. The role of wall effect on the physical-chemical interaction process is numerically studied. A pressure wave is generated after hot spot auto-ignition and gradually damped as it propagates. The reflection of the wall forms a reflected pressure wave with twice the amplitude of the incident wave near the wall. The superposition of the reflected and forward pressure waves reinforces the intensity of the initial pressure wave. Wall effect is determined by the distance between the hot spot center and the cylinder wall. Hot spot auto-ignition near the wall easily initiates detonation under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions because pressure wave reflection couples with chemical reactions and propagates in the mixture with high reactivity.

An experimental study of particulate matter (PM) emission was conducted on four cars from Chinese market. Three cars were powered by gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines and one car was powered by a port fuel injection (PFI) engine. Particulate mass, number and size distribution were measured based on a chassis dynamometer over new European driving cycle (NEDC). The particulate emission behaviors during cold start and hot start NEDCs were compared to understand how the running conditions influence particulate emission. Three kinds of gasoline with RON 91.9, 94.0 and 97.4 were tested to find the impact of RON on particulate emission. Because of time and facilities constraints, only one cold/hot start NEDC was conducted for every vehicle fueled with every fuel. The test results showed that more particles were emitted during cold start condition (first 200s in NEDC). Compared with cold start NEDC, the particulate mass and number of hot start NEDC decreased by a wide margin.

The effects of the temporal and spatial distributions of ignition timings of combustion zones on combustion noise in a Direct Injection Compression Ignition (DICI) engine were studied using experimental tests and numerical simulations. The experiments were performed with different fuel injection strategies on a heavy-duty diesel engine. Cylinder pressure was measured with the sampling intervals of 0.1°CA in order to resolve noise components. The simulations were performed using the KIVA-3V code with detailed chemistry to analyze the in-cylinder ignition and combustion processes. The experimental results show that optimal sequential ignition and spatial distribution of combustion zones can be realized by adopting a two-stage injection strategy in which the proportion of the pilot injection fuel and the timings of the injections can be used to control the combustion process, thus resulting in simultaneously higher thermal efficiency and lower noise emissions.

High boost and direct injection hold the potential of enhanced power density and fuel consumption in the development of gasoline engines. However, super-knock with strong destructiveness was widely reported at low-speed and high-load operating regime in turbocharged GDI engines. The objective of this study is to clarify the characteristics of super-knock and to try to find some feasible solutions to suppress super-knock. To fast evaluate super-knock at low-speed and high-load regime, a rapid test procedure including three super-knock test sections of 5000 cycles with 3 idle operations, was proposed. The experimental data indicate that pre-ignition is not the sufficient condition for super-knock. Pre-ignition may lead to super-knock, heavy knock, slight knock, and non-knock. Compared with conventional knock, knock intensity of super-knock is much higher and the maximum amplitude of pressure rise at start of knock is more than one order of magnitude higher.

This paper studied the knock combustion process in gasoline HCCI engines. The complex chemical kinetics was implemented into the three-dimensional CFD code with LES (Large eddy simulation) to study the origin of the knock phenomena in HCCI combustion process. The model was validated using the experimental data from the cylinder pressure measurement. 3D-CFD with LES method gives detailed turbulence, species, temperature and pressure distribution during the gasoline HCCI combustion process. The simulation results indicate that HCCI engine knock originates from the random multipoint auto-ignition in the combustion chamber due to the slight inhomogeneity. It is induced by the significantly different heat release rate of high temperature oxidation (HTO) and low temperature oxidation (LTO) and their interactions.

Ammonia shows promise as an alternative fuel for internal combustion engines (ICEs) in reducing CO2 emissions due to its carbon-free nature and well-established infrastructure. However, certain drawbacks, such as the high ignition energy, the narrow flammability range, and the extremely low laminar flame speed, limit its widespread application. The dual fuel (DF) mode is an appealing approach to enhance ammonia combustion. The combustion characteristics of ammonia-diesel dual fuel mode and ammonia-PODE3 dual fuel mode were experimentally studied using a full-view optical engine and the high-speed photography method. The ammonia energy ratio (ERa) was varied from 40% to 60%, and the main injection energy ratio (ERInj1) and the main injection time (SOI1) were also varied in ammonia-PODE3 mode.

In the context of carbon neutrality, ammonia is considered a zero-carbon fuel with potential applications in the transportation sector. However, its high ignition energy, low flame speed, and high natural temperature, indicative of low reactivity, make it challenging to be applied as a sole fuel in engines. In such a scenario, the use of another zero-carbon and highly reactive fuel, hydrogen, becomes necessary to enhance the combustion of ammonia. Furthermore, jet ignition, a method known for improving engine combustion performance, may also hold potential for enhancing the combustion performance of ammonia engines. To explore the applicability of jet ignition in engines, this study conducted experimental research on a single-cylinder engine. Two ignition methods were employed: passive jet ignition of premixed ammonia-hydrogen at a compression ratio of 11.5, and active jet ignition of pure ammonia using hydrogen jet flame at a compression ratio of 17.3.