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As the petroleum depletion, some of this demand will probably have to be met by increasing the production of diesel fuels from heavy oil or unconventional oil in the near future. Such fuels may inevitably have a lower cetane number (CN) with a higher concentration of aromatic components. The objective of the present research is to identify the effects of a typical biodiesel fuel as a CN improver for a light-duty diesel engine for passenger cars. Our previous study indicates that methyl oleate (MO), which is an oxygenated fuel representative of major constituents of many biodiesel types, can reduce soot and NOx emissions simultaneously by optimizing performance under exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) when used as a diesel fuel additive. In addition, it was found that MO tends to reduce the ignition delay. We employed a 2.2 L passenger car DI diesel engine complying with the Euro 4 emissions regulation.

The objective of the present research is to investigate the effects on diesel engine combustion and NOx and PM emission characteristics in case of blending the ordinary diesel fuel with biodiesel in passenger car diesel engines. Firstly, we conducted experiments to identify the combustion and emissions characteristics in a modern diesel engine complying with the EURO 4 emission standard. Then, we developed a numerical simulation model to explain and generalize biodiesel combustion phenomena in detail and generalize emission characteristics. The experimental and simulation results are useful to reduce biodiesel emissions by controlling engine operating and design parameters in the diesel engine. Engine tests were conducted and a mathematical model created to investigate the effects of 40% and 100% methyl oleate modeled fuel representing Jatropha-derived biodiesel on diesel combustion and emission characteristics, over a wide range of passenger car DI diesel engine operating conditions.

A study has been made of an automotive direct injection diesel engine designed to reduce exhaust emissions, particularly NOx and particulates, without performance deterioration. Special emphasis has been placed on air-fuel mixing conditions controlled by the fuel injection rate, the intake swirl ratio, and the intake boost pressure. By means of increasing the injection rate, ignition delay can be shortened enough to improve particulate emissions at retarded injection timings. Enhancing the intake swirl velocity contributes to the reduction of soot emission in spite of the deterioration of NOx emission. Supercharging can favorably enhance diffusion combustion resulting in improved fuel economy for retarded injection timings and reduced emissions. As a result, a good compromise can be achieved between fuel economy and exhaust emissions by increasing the injection rate along with retarding the injection timing. Supercharging was found to be more favorable than swirl enhancement.

An experimental and numerical study has been conducted on the emission and reduction of HCHO (formaldehyde) and other pollutants formed in the cylinder of a direct-injection diesel engine fueled by methanol. Engine tests were performed under a variety of intake conditions including throttling, heating, and EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) for the purpose of improving these emissions by changing gas compositions and combustion temperatures in the cylinder. Moreover, a detailed kinetics model was developed and applied to methanol combustion to investigate HCHO formation and the reduction mechanism influenced by associated elementary reactions and in-cylinder mixing.

A numerical model has been developed to predict the formation of NOx and formaldehyde in the combustion and post-combustion zones of a methanol DI engine. For this purpose, a methanol-air mixture model combined with a full kinetics model has been introduced, taking into account 39 species with their 157 related elementary reactions. Through these kinetic simulations, a concept is proposed for optimizing methanol combustion and reducing exhaust emissions.

The objective of the present study is to analyze soot formation in diesel engine combustion by using multi-dimensional combustion simulations with a parallelized explicit ODE solver. Parallelized CHEMEQ2 was used to perform detailed chemical kinetics in KIVA-4 code. CHEMEQ2 is an explicit stiff ODE solver developed by Mott et al. which is known to be faster than traditional implicit ODE solvers, e.g., DVODE. In the present study, about eight times faster computation was achieved with CHEMEQ2 compared to DVODE when using a single thread. Further, by parallelizing CHEMEQ2 using OpenMP, the simulations could be run not only on calculation servers but also on desktop machines. The computation time decreases with the number of threads used. The parallelized CHEMEQ2 enabled combustion and emission characteristics, including detailed soot formation processes, to be predicted using KIVA-4 code with detailed chemical kinetics without the need for reducing the reaction mechanism.

From the viewpoint of utilizing methanol fuel in an automotive turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine, an intercooling system supplying liquid methanol has been devised and its effects on engine performance and exhaust gas emissions have been investigated. With an electronically controlled injector in this system, methanol as a supplementary fuel to diesel fuel can be injected into the intake pipe in order to intercool a hot air charge compressed by the turbocharger. It has been confirmed that especially at heavy load conditions, methanol-intercooling can yield a higher thermal efficiency, and lower NOx and smoke emissions simultaneously, compared with three other cases without using methanol: natural aspiration and the cases with and without an ordinary intercooler. However, methanol fueling must be avoided at lower loads since sacrifices in efficiency and hydrocarbon emissions are inevitably involved.

A urea SCR system was combined with a DPF system to reduce NOx and PM in a four liters turbocharged with intercooler diesel engine. Significant reduction in NOx was observed at low exhaust gas temperatures by increasing NH3 adsorption quantity in the SCR catalyst. Control logic of the NH3 adsorption quantity for transient operation was developed based on the NH3 adsorption characteristics on the SCR catalyst. It has been shown that NOx can be reduced by 75% at the average SCR inlet gas temperature of 158 deg.C by adopting the NH3 adsorption quantity control in the JE05 Mode.

A dual fuel natural gas diesel engine suffers from remarkably lower thermal efficiency and higher THC, CO emissions at lower load because of its lower burned mass fraction caused by the lean pre-mixture. To overcome this inevitable disadvantage at lower load, two methods of reducing the number of operating cylinders were examined. One method was to use the two cylinders operation while the second one was to use the quasi-two cylinders operation. As a result, it was found that the unburned hydrocarbons and CO emissions could be favorably reduced with the improvement of thermal efficiency by reducing the number of cylinders to half for a dual fuel natural gas diesel engine. Moreover, it was also found that the quasi-two cylinders operation could improve the torque fluctuation more compared to the two cylinders operation.

Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) is effective for the simultaneous reduction of soot and NOx emissions in diesel engine. In general, high octane number fuels (gasoline components or gaseous fuels) are used for HCCI operation, because these fuels briefly form lean homogeneous mixture because of long ignition delay and high volatility. However, it is necessary to improve injection systems, when these high octane number fuels are used in diesel engine. In addition, the difficulty of controlling auto-ignition timing must be resolved. On the other hand, HCCI using diesel fuel (diesel HCCI) also needs ignition control, because diesel fuel which has a low octane number causes the early ignition before TDC. The purpose of this study is the ignition and combustion control of diesel HCCI. The effects of parameters (injection timing, injection pressure, internal/external EGR, boost pressure, and variable valve timing (VVT)) on the ignition timing of diesel HCCI were investigated.

Primary work is to investigate premixed laminar flame propagation in a constant volume chamber of iso-octane/air combustion. Experimental and numerical results are investigated by comparing flame front displacements under lean to rich conditions. As the laminar flame depends on equivalence ratio, temperature, and pressure conditions, it is a main property for chemical reaction mechanism validation. Firstly, one-dimensional laminar flame burning velocities are predicted in order to validate a reduced chemical reaction mechanism. A set of laminar burning velocities with pressure, temperature, and mixture equivalence ratio dependences are combined into a 3D-CFD calculation to compare the predicted flame front displacements with that of experiments. It is found that the reaction mechanism is well validated under the coupled 1D-3D combustion calculations. Next, lean experiments are operated in a SI engine by boosting intake pressure to maintain high efficiency without output power penalty.

Experimental and numerical studies are conducted on the formation of soot and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), regarded as precursors of soot, during the combustion of fuel-rich homogeneous n-heptane mixtures. In-cylinder gases are sampled directly through a high-speed solenoid valve in engine tests, to be analyzed by GC/MS for qualifying PAHs. Smoke concentration is also measured. A numerical study is carried out by using a zero-dimensional model combined with detailed chemical kinetics. The experiments and computations show that PAHs can be predicted qualitatively by means of the present kinetic model.

Experimental and numerical studies on PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons) and PM (Particulate Matters) formed in the fuel rich mixture have been conducted. In the experiment, neat n-heptane and n-heptane with benzene 25 % by weight were chosen as test fuels. In-cylinder gases produced by the fuel-rich HCCI (Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition) combustion were directly sampled and analyzed by the use of GC/MS (Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectro- metry), and PM emission was also measured by PM sampling system to reveal characteristics of PM formation. Numerical study has been also carried out using a zero dimensional combustion model combined with detailed chemistry. Furthermore, simple surface growth of soot particles was integrated into a detailed chemical kinetic model, and validated with the experimental data.

In this study, we selected four unregulated emissions species, formaldehyde, benzene, 1,3-butadiene and benzo[a]pyrene to research the emission characteristics of these unregulated components experimentally. The engine used was a water-cooled, 8-liter, 6-cylinder, 4-stroke-cycle, turbocharged DI diesel engine with a common rail fuel injection system manufactured for the use of medium-duty trucks, and the fuel used was JIS second-class light gas oil, which is commercially available as diesel fuel. The results of experiments indicate as follows: formaldehyde tends to be emitted under the low load condition, while 1,3-butadiene is emitted at the low engine speed. This is believed to be because 1,3-butadiene decomposes in a short time, and the exhaust gas stays much longer in a cylinder under the low speed condition than under the high engine speed one. Benzene is emitted under the low load condition, as it is easily oxidized in high temperature.

Swirl injector spray at high fuel temperatures has unique characteristics [1][2][3][4] compared to normal fuel temperature spray such as strong penetration and narrow spray width. These characteristics have a possibility for improving fuel consumption and exhaust emission at the cold start condition. Thus, Swirl injector spray at high fuel temperature conditions was modeled in a CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) code by using a multi components fuel evaporation model and other spray sub-models to predict the mixture formation process at the cold start condition. Results show that, high temperature fuel decreases wall film amount and increases vapor amount. It can be concluded that high temperature fuel has the possibility for improving fuel consumption and exhaust emission at the cold start condtion.

A study has been made of an automotive direct-injection diesel engine in order to identify the effects of the combustion chamber geometry on combustion, with special emphasis focused on a re-entrant combustion chamber. Conventional combustion chambers and a re-entrant one were compared in terms of the combustion process, engine performance and NOx and smoke emissions. Heat transfer calculations and heat release analyses show that the re-entrant chamber tends to reduce ignition lag due to the higher temperatures of the wall on which injected fuel impinges. Analyses of turbulent flow characteristics in each chamber indicate that the re-entrant chamber enhances combustion because of the higher in-cylinder velocity accompanied by increased turbulence. Further, analyses of in-cylinder gas samples show lower soot levels in the re-entrant chamber. As a result, a good compromise can be achieved between fuel economy and exhaust emissions by retarding the fuel injection timing.

An experimental ultra lightweight compact vehicle named “the Waseda Future Vehicle” has been designed and developed, aiming at a simultaneous achievement of low exhaust gas emissions, high fuel economy and driving performance. The vehicle is powered by a dual-type hybrid system having a SI engine, electric motor and generator. A high performance lithium-ion battery unit is used for electricity storage. A variety of driving cycles were reproduced using the hybrid vehicle on a chassis dynamometer. By changing the logics and parameters in the electronic control unit (ECU) of the engine, a significant improvement in emissions was possible, achieving a very high fuel economy of 34 km/h at the Japanese 10-15 drive mode. At the same time, a numerical simulation model has been developed to predict fuel economy. This would be very useful in determining design factors and optimizing operating conditions in the hybrid power system.

A mixed time-scale subgrid large eddy simulation was used to simulate mixture formation, combustion and soot formation under the influence of turbulence during diesel engine combustion. To account for the effects of engine wall heat transfer on combustion, the KIVA code's standard wall model was replaced to accommodate more realistic boundary conditions. This were carried out by implementing the non-isothermal wall model of Angelberger et al. with modifications and incorporating the log law from Pope's method to account for the wall surface roughness. Soot and NOx emissions predicted with the new model are compared to experimental data acquired under various EGR conditions.

A new type of fuel injection nozzle, called a “slit nozzle,” has been developed to improve poor ignitability and to stabilize combustion under low load conditions in direct-injection methanol diesel engines manufactured for medium-duty trucks. This nozzle has a single oblong vent like a slit. Engine test results indicate that the slit nozzle can improve combustion and thermal efficiency, especially at low loads and no load. This can be explained by the fact that the slit nozzle forms a more highly concentrated methanol spray around the glow-plug than do multi-hole nozzles. As a result, this nozzle improves flame propagation.

Urea-SCR system has a high NOx reduction potential in the steady-state diesel engine operation. In complicated transient operations, however, there are certain problems with the urea-SCR system in that NOx reduction performance degrades and adsorbed NH3 would be emitted. Here, optimum urea injection methods and exhaust bypass control to overcome these problems are studied. This exhaust bypass control enables NO/NOx ratio at the inlet of SCR catalyst to be decreased widely, which prevents over production of NO2 at the pre-oxidation catalyst. Steady-state and simple transient engine tests were conducted to clarify NOx reduction characteristics when optimum urea injection pattern and exhaust bypass control were applied. In simple transient test, only the engine load was rapidly changed for obtaining the fundamental knowledge concerning the effect of those techniques.