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The paper presents the development of a novel approach to the solution of detailed chemistry in internal combustion engine simulations, which relies on the analytical computation of the ordinary differential equations (ODE) system Jacobian matrix in sparse form. Arbitrary reaction behaviors in either Arrhenius, third-body or fall-off formulations can be considered, and thermodynamic gas-phase mixture properties are evaluated according to the well-established 7-coefficient JANAF polynomial form. The current work presents a full validation of the new chemistry solver when coupled to the KIVA-4 code, through modeling of a single cylinder Caterpillar 3401 heavy-duty engine, running in two-stage combustion mode.

Reactivity-controlled compression ignition (RCCI) has been shown to be capable of providing improved engine efficiencies coupled with the benefit of low emissions via in-cylinder fuel blending. Much of the previous body of work has studied the benefits of RCCI operation using high injection pressures (e.g., 500 bar or greater) with common rail injection (CRI) hardware. However, low-pressure fueling technology is capable of providing significant cost savings. Due to the broad market adoption of gasoline direct injection (GDI) fueling systems, a market-type prototype GDI injector was selected for this study. Single-cylinder light-duty engine experiments were undertaken to examine the performance and emissions characteristics of the RCCI combustion strategy with low-pressure GDI technology and compared against high injection pressure RCCI operation. Gasoline and diesel were used as the low-reactivity and high-reactivity fuels, respectively.

To overcome the trade-off between NOx and particulate emissions for future diesel vehicles and engines it is necessary to seek methods to lower pollutant emissions. The desired simultaneous improvement in fuel efficiency for future DI (Direct Injection) diesels is also a difficult challenge due to the combustion modifications that will be required to meet the exhaust emission mandates. This study demonstrates the emission reduction capability of split injections, EGR (Exhaust Gas Recirculation), and other parameters on a High Speed Direct Injection (HSDI) diesel engine equipped with a common rail injection system using an RSM (Response Surface Method) optimization method. The optimizations were conducted at 1757 rev/min, 45% load. Six factors were considered for the optimization, namely the EGR rate, SOI (Start of Injection), intake boost pressure, and injection pressure, the percentage of fuel in the first injection, and the dwell between injections.

A study was performed in which the effects on the regulated emissions from a commercial small DI diesel engine were measured for different refinery-derived fuel blends. Seven different fuel blends were tested, of which two were deemed to merit more detailed evaluation. To investigate the effects of fuel properties on the combustion processes with these fuel blends, two-color pyrometry was used via optically accessible cylinderheads. Additional data were obtained with one of the fuel blends with a heavy-duty DI diesel engine. California diesel fuel was used as a baseline. The fuel blends were made by mixing the components typically found in gasoline, such as methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) and whole fluid catalytic cracking gasoline (WH-FCC). The mixing was performed on a volume basis. Cetane improver (CI) was added to maintain the same cetane number (CN) of the fuel blends as that of the baseline fuel.

Due to concerns regarding pollutant and CO2 emissions, advanced combustion modes that can simultaneously reduce exhaust emissions and improve thermal efficiency have been widely investigated. The main characteristic of the new combustion strategies, such as HCCI and LTC, is that the formation of a homogenous mixture or a controllable stratified mixture is required prior to ignition. The major issue with these approaches is the lack of a direct method for the control of ignition timing and combustion rate, which can be only indirectly controlled using high EGR rates and/or lean mixtures. Homogeneous Charge Progressive Combustion (HCPC) is based on the split-cycle principle. Intake and compression phases are performed in a reciprocating external compressor, which drives the air into the combustor cylinder during the combustion process, through a transfer duct. A transfer valve is positioned between the compressor cylinder and the transfer duct.

The effect of the ring pack storage mechanism on the hydrocarbon (HC) emissions from an air-cooled utility engine has been studied using a simplified ring pack model. Tests were performed for a range of engine load, two engine speeds, varied air-fuel ratio and with a fixed ignition timing using a homogeneous, pre-vaporized fuel mixture system. The integrated mass of HC leaving the crevices from the end of combustion (the crank angle that the cumulative burn fraction reached 90%) to exhaust valve closing was taken to represent the potential contribution of the ring pack to the overall HC emissions; post-oxidation in the cylinder will consume some of this mass. Time-resolved exhaust HC concentration measurements were also performed, and the instantaneous exhaust HC mass flow rate was determined using the measured exhaust and cylinder pressure.

An emissions and performance study was conducted to explore the effects of EGR and multiple injections on particulate, NOx, and BSFC. EGR is known to be effective at reducing NOx, but at high loads there is usually a large increase in particulate. Recent work has shown that multiple injections are effective at reducing particulate. Thus, it was of interest to examine the possibility of simultaneously reducing particulate and NOx with the combined use of EGR and multiple injections. The tests were conducted on a fully instrumented single cylinder version of the Caterpillar 3406 heavy duty truck engine. Tests were done at high load (75% of peak torque at 1600 RPM where EGR has been shown to produce unacceptable increases in particulate emissions. The fuel system used was an electronically controlled, common rail injector and supporting hardware. The fuel system was capable of up to four independent injections per cycle.

A study of statistical optimization of engine operating parameters was conducted. The objective of the study was to develop a strategy to efficiently optimize operating parameters of diesel engines with multiple injection and EGR capabilities. Previous studies have indicated that multiple injections with EGR can provide substantial simultaneous reductions in emissions of particulate and NOx from heavy-duty diesel engines, but careful optimization of the operating parameters is necessary in order to receive the full benefit of these combustion control techniques. The goal of the present study was to optimize the control parameters to reduce emissions and brake specific fuel consumption. An instrumented single-cylinder heavy-duty diesel engine was used with a prototype mechanically actuated (cam driven) fuel injection system.

Neural networks are useful tools for optimization studies since they are very fast, so that while capturing the accuracy of multi-dimensional CFD calculations or experimental data, they can be run numerous times as required by many optimization techniques. This paper describes how a set of neural networks trained on a multi-dimensional CFD code to predict pressure, temperature, heat flux, torque and emissions, have been used by a genetic algorithm in combination with a hill-climbing type algorithm to optimize operating parameters of a diesel engine over the entire speed-torque map of the engine. The optimized parameters are mass of fuel injected per cycle, shape of the injection profile for dual split injection, start of injection, EGR level and boost pressure. These have been optimized for minimum emissions. Another set of neural networks have been trained to predict the optimized parameters, based on the speed-torque point of the engine.

A study of partially premixed combustion (PPC) with non-oxygenated 91 pump octane number1 (PON) commercially available gasoline was performed using a heavy-duty (HD) compression-ignition (CI) 2.44 l Caterpillar 3401E single-cylinder oil test engine (SCOTE). The experimental conditions selected were a net indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) of 11.5 bar, an engine speed of 1300 rev/min, an intake temperature of 40°C with intake and exhaust pressures of 200 and 207 kPa, respectively. The baseline case for all studies presented had 0% exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), used a dual injection strategy a -137 deg ATDC pilot SOI and a -6 deg ATDC main start-of-injection (SOI) timing with a 30/70% pilot/main fuel split for a total of 5.3 kg/h fueling (equating to approximately 50% load). Combustion and emissions characteristics were explored relative to the baseline case by sweeping main and pilot SOI timings, injection split fuel percentage, intake pressure, load and EGR levels.

The hybrid vehicle engines modified for high exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is a good choice for high efficiency and low NOx emissions. However, high EGR will dilute the engine charge and may cause serious performance problems, such as incomplete combustion, torque fluctuation, and engine misfire. An efficient way to overcome these drawbacks is to intensify tumble leading to increased turbulent intensity at the time of ignition. The enhancement of turbulent intensity will increase flame velocity and improve combustion quality, therefore increasing engine tolerance to higher EGR. To achieve the goal of increasing tolerance to EGR, this work reports a CFD investigation of high tumble intake port design using STAR-CD. The validations had been performed through the comparison with PIV experimental tests.

The lift-off length plays a significant role in spray combustion as it influences the air entrainment upstream of the lift-off location and hence the soot formation. Accurate prediction of lift-off length thus becomes a prerequisite for accurate soot prediction in lifted flames. In the present study, KIVA-3v coupled with CHEMKIN, as developed at the Engine Research Center (ERC), is used as the CFD model. Experimental data from the Sandia National Labs. is used for validating the model predictions of n-heptane lift-off lengths and soot formation details in a constant volume combustion chamber. It is seen that the model predictions, in terms of lift-off length and soot mass, agree well with the experimental results for low ambient density (14.8 kg/m3) cases with different EGR rates (21% O2 - 8% O2). However, for high density cases (30 kg/m3) with different EGR rates (15% O2 - 8% O2) disagreements were found.

In multidimensional modeling, fuels have been represented predominantly by single components, such as octane for gasoline. Several bicomponent studies have been performed, but these are still limited in their ability to represent real fuels, which are blends of as many as 300 components. This study outlines a method by which the fuel composition is represented by a distribution function of the fuel molecular weight. This allows a much wider range of compositions to be modeled, and only requires including two additional “species” besides the fuel, namely the mean and second moment of the distribution. This approach has been previously presented but is applied here to multidimensional calculations. Results are presented for single component droplet vaporization for comparison with single component fuel predictions, as well as results for a multicomponent gasoline and a diesel droplet.

A modified version of the multi-dimensional KIVA-II code is used to model the effects of multiple injection schemes and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) on direct injected diesel engine NOx and soot emissions. The computational results, which also considered double and triple injection schemes and varying EGR amounts, are compared with experimental data obtained from a single cylinder version of a Caterpillar heavy-duty truck engine. The study is done at high load (75% of peak torque at 1600 rpm) where EGR is known to produce unacceptable increases in soot (particulate). The effect of soot and spray model formulations are considered. This includes a new spray model based on Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities for liquid breakup. A soot oxidation model that accounts for turbulent mixing and kinetic effects were found to give accurate results. The results showed excellent agreement between predicted and measured in-cylinder pressure, and heat release data for the various cases.

In this paper, knock in a Ford single cylinder direct-injection spark-ignition (DISI) engine was modeled and investigated using the KIVA-3V code with a G-equation combustion model coupled with detailed chemical kinetics. The deflagrative turbulent flame propagation was described by the G-equation combustion model. A 22-species, 42-reaction iso-octane (iC8H18) mechanism was adopted to model the auto-ignition process of the gasoline/air/residual-gas mixture ahead of the flame front. The iso-octane mechanism was originally validated by ignition delay tests in a rapid compression machine. In this study, the mechanism was tested by comparing the simulated ignition delay time in a constant volume mesh with the values measured in a shock tube under different initial temperature, pressure and equivalence ratio conditions, and acceptable agreements were obtained.

A two-zone NOx model intended for 1-D engine simulations was developed and used to model NOx emissions from a 2.5 L single-cylinder engine. The intent of the present work is to understand key aspects of a simple NOx model that are needed for predictive accuracy, including NOx formation and destruction phenomena in a DI Diesel combustion system. The presented two-zone model is fundamentally based on the heat release rate and thermodynamic incylinder data, and uses the Extended Zeldovich mechanism to model NO. Results show that the model responded very well to changes in speed, load, injection timing, and EGR level. It matched measured tail pipe NOx levels within 20%, using a single tuning setup. When the model was applied to varied injection rate shapes, it showed correct sensitivity to speed, load, injection timing, and EGR level, but the absolute level was well outside the target accuracy. The same limitation was seen when applying the Plee NOx model.

Past research has shown that reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion offers efficiency and NOx and soot advantages over conventional diesel combustion at mid load conditions. However, at high load and low speed conditions, the chemistry timescale of the fuel shortens and the engine timescale lengthens. This mismatch in timescales makes operation at high load and low speed conditions difficult. High levels of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) can be used to extend the chemistry timescales; however, this comes at the penalty of increased pumping losses. In the present study, targeting the high load - low speed regime, computational optimizations of RCCI combustion were performed at 20 bar gross indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) and 1300 rev/min. The two fuels used for the study were gasoline (low reactivity) and diesel (high reactivity).

A continuous multi-component fuel evaporation model has been integrated with an improved G-equation combustion and detailed chemical kinetics model. The integrated code has been successfully used to simulate a gasoline direct injection engine. In the multi-component fuel model, the theory of continuous thermodynamics is used to model the properties and composition of multi-component fuels such as gasoline. In the improved G-equation combustion model a flamelet approach based on the G-equation is used that considers multi-component fuel effects. To precisely calculate the local and instantaneous residual which has a great effect on the laminar flame speed, a “transport equation residual” model is used. A Damkohler number criterion is used to determine the combustion mode in flame containing cells.

An image acquisition-and-processing camera system was developed for in-cylinder diagnostics of a single-cylinder heavy duty diesel engine. The engine was equipped with an electronically-controlled common-rail fuel injection system that allowed both single and split (multiple) injections to be studied. The imaging system uses an endoscope to acquire luminous flame images from the combustion chamber and ensures minimum modification to the engine geometry. The system also includes an optical linkage, an image intensifier, a CID camera, a frame grabber, control circuitry and a computer. Experiments include both single and split injection cases at 90 MPa and 45 MPa injection pressures at 3/4 load and 1600 rev/min with simulated turbocharging. For the single injection at high injection pressure (90 MPa) the results show that the first luminous emissions from the ignition zone occur very close to the injector exit followed by rapid luminous flame spreading.

Many recent studies have shown that the Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition (RCCI) combustion strategy can achieve high efficiency with low emissions. However, it has also been revealed that RCCI combustion is difficult at high loads due to its premixed nature. To operate at moderate to high loads with gasoline/diesel dual fuel, high amounts of EGR or an ultra low compression ratio have shown to be required. Considering that both of these approaches inherently lower thermodynamic efficiency, in this study natural gas was utilized as a replacement for gasoline as the low-reactivity fuel. Due to the lower reactivity (i.e., higher octane number) of natural gas compared to gasoline, it was hypothesized to be a better fuel for RCCI combustion, in which a large reactivity gradient between the two fuels is beneficial in controlling the maximum pressure rise rate.