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The effects of injection pressure and swirl ratio on the in-cylinder soot oxidation are studied using simultaneous PLIF imaging of OH and LII imaging of soot in an optical diesel engine. Images are acquired after the end of injection in the recirculation zone between two adjacent diesel jets. Scalars are extracted from the images and compared with trends in engine-out soot emissions. The soot emissions decrease monotonically with increasing injection pressure but show a non-linear dependence on swirl ratio. The total amount of OH in the images is negatively correlated with the soot emissions, as is the spatial proximity between the OH and soot regions. This indicates that OH is an important soot oxidizer and that it needs to be located close to the soot to perform this function. The total amount of soot in the images shows no apparent correlation with the soot emissions, indicating that the amount of soot formed is a poor predictor of the emission trends.

Small closely-coupled post injections of fuel in diesel engines are known to reduce engine-out soot emissions, but the relative roles of various underlying in-cylinder mechanisms have not been established. Furthermore, the efficacy of soot reduction is not universal, and depends in unclear ways on operating conditions and injection schedule, among other factors. Consequently, designing engine hardware and operating strategies to fully realize the potential of post-injections is limited by this lack of understanding. Following previous work, several different post-injection schedules are investigated using a single-cylinder 2.34 L heavy-duty optical engine equipped with a Delphi DFI 1.5 light-duty injector. In this configuration, adding a closely-coupled post injection with sufficiently short injection duration can increase the load without increasing soot emissions.

The effect of an annular, piston bowl-rim cavity on in-cylinder and engine-out soot emissions is measured in a heavy-duty, optically accessible, single-cylinder diesel engine using in-cylinder soot diagnostics and exhaust smoke emission measurements. The baseline piston configuration consists of a right-cylindrical bowl, while the cavity-piston configuration features an additional annular cavity that is located below the piston bowl-rim and connected to the main-combustion chamber through a thin annular passage, accounting for a 3% increase in the clearance volume, resulting in a reduction in geometric compression ratio (CR) from 11.22 to 10.91. Experiments using the cavity-piston configuration showed a significant reduction of engine-out smoke ranging from 20-60% over a range of engine loads.

Soot emissions from diesel internal combustion engines are strictly regulated nowadays. Laser extinction measurement (LEM) and natural luminosity (NL) of sooty flames are commonly applied to study soot. LEM measures soot along the laser beam path and it can probe soot regardless of temperature. NL integrates the whole field of view and relies on soot temperature. In this work, a comparison of simultaneously recorded LEM and NL data has been performed in a heavy-duty optical engine. A 685 nm laser beam is used for LEM. The laser was modulated at 63 kHz, which facilitated subtraction of the background NL signal from the raw LEM data. By Beer-Lambert’s law, KL factor can be calculated and used as a metric to describe soot measurements. A compensation of transmitted laser intensity fluctuation and soot deposits on optical windows has been performed in this work.