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A quantitative and time-resolved technique has been developed to probe the fuel distribution very near the nozzle of a high-pressure diesel injector. This technique uses the absorption of synchrotron x-rays to measure the fuel mass with good time and position resolution. The penetrating power of x-rays allows measurements that are difficult with other techniques, such as quantitative measurements of the mass and penetration measurements of the trailing edge of the spray. Line-of-sight measurements were used to determine the fuel density as a function of time. The high time resolution and quantitative nature of the measurement also permit an accurate measure of the instantaneous mass flow rate through the nozzle.

In order to analyze the effects of nozzle geometry on the structure of fuel sprays, quantitative x-ray measurements have been performed on sprays from nozzles with different degrees of hydro-grinding. The two nozzles were measured at injection pressures of 500 and 1000 bar in an ambient environment of 1 bar nitrogen gas. Time-resolved x-radiography was used to measure the two-dimensional mass distributions of the spray as a function of time for the entire spray event. The initial mass flow through the nozzles was determined from the x-ray data, the nozzles showed no appreciable differences in the early part of the injection event. The transverse mass distributions were fit with Gaussian curves, and the assumption of axisymmetry was used to calculate the volume fraction of each spray. It was observed that the nozzle which had undergone extensive hydro-grinding generated a more dense spray than the sharp-edged nozzle at an injection pressure of 1000 bar.

The fuel economy of recent small size DI diesel engines has become more and more efficient. However, heat loss is still one of the major factors contributing to a substantial amount of energy loss in engines. In order to a full understanding of the heat loss mechanism from combustion gas to cylinder wall, the effect of hole size and rail pressure at similar injection rate condition on transient heat flux to the wall were investigated. Using a constant volume vessel with a fixed impingement wall, the study measured the surface heat flux of the wall at the locations of spray flame impingement using three thin-film thermocouple heat-flux sensors. The results showed that the transferred heat was similar under similar injection rate profiles. However, in case of flame luminosity, temperature distribution, characteristic of local heat flux and soot distribution was also similar except the smaller nozzle hole size with higher injection pressure.

Simplified visualization of the fuel spray developing process in a small D.I. diesel engine was made by the liquid injection technique. In this technique, a liquid fuel was injected into another liquid to simulate injection into a high pressure gaseous atmosphere. For obtaining spray characteristics in the liquid similar to a diesel spray in a high-pressure gaseous atmosphere, the similarity principles based on the Reynolds number of the fuel flow at a nozzle hole and empirical equations of the spray penetration including the breakup length were introduced in this study. Especially, the injector was newly designed for the liquid injection technique based on these similarity principles. The behavior of the spray in a swirling flow was investigated. The spray with different breakup length shows different behavior in the same swirling flow.

To get a better understanding of the characteristics of the high pressure gasoline sprays impinging on a wall, a fundamental study was conducted in a high-temperature high-pressure constant volume vessel under the simulated engine conditions of in-cylinder pressures, temperatures, and wall temperatures. The injection pressure was varied from 20 to 120 MPa. The spray tip penetration, vapor mass distribution, and vaporization rate were quantitatively measured with the laser absorption-scattering (LAS) technique. The velocity fields of the wall-impinging sprays under vaporizing conditions were measured with the particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique using silicone oil droplets as tracers. The effects of injection pressure and spray/wall interactions on spray characteristics were investigated. The results showed that the increased injection pressure improved penetration, vaporization, and turbulence of the sprays.

Some experimental investigations have shown that the trade-off curve of NOx vs. particulate of a D.I. diesel engine with split-injection strategies can be shifted closer to the origin than those with a single-pulse injection, thus reducing both particulate and NOx emissions significantly. It is clear that the injection mass ratios and the dwell(s) between injection pulses have significant effects on the combustion and emissions formation processes in the D.I. diesel engine. However, how and why these parameters significantly affect the engine performances remains unexplained. The effects of both injection mass ratios and dwell between injections on vapor/liquid distributions in the split-injection diesel sprays impinging on a flat wall have been examined in our previous work.

Gasoline direct injection (GDI) has the potential to greatly improve internal combustion engine performance through precise control of the injection rate, timing, and combustion of the fuel. A thorough characterization of the hydrodynamics of fuel injection has to come from a precise, quantitative analysis of the sprays, especially in the near-nozzle region. A lack of knowledge of the fuel-spray dynamics has severely limited computational modeling of the sprays and design of improved injection systems. Previously, the structure and dynamics of highly transient fuel sprays have never been visualized or reconstructed in three dimensions (3D) due to numerous technical difficulties. By using an ultrafast x-ray detector and intense monochromatic x-ray beams from synchrotron radiation, the fine structures and dynamics of 1-ms GDI fuel sprays from an outwardly opening nozzle were elucidated by a newly developed, ultrafast, microsecond computed microtomography (CT) technique.

Propagation-based and phase-enhanced x-ray imaging was developed as a unique metrology technique to visualize the internal structure of high-pressure fuel injection nozzles. We have visualized the microstructures inside 200-μm fuel injection nozzles in a 3-mm-thick steel housing using this novel technique. Furthermore, this new x-ray-based metrology technique has been used to directly study the highly transient needle motion in the nozzles in situ and in real-time, which is virtually impossible by any other means. The needle motion has been shown to have the most direct effect on the fuel jet structure and spray formation immediately outside of the nozzle. In addition, the spray cone-angle has been perfectly correlated with the numerically simulated fuel flow inside the nozzle due to the transient nature of the needle during the injection.

An experimental study was made of the two-dimensional distributions of the fuel vapor concentration simulated by Freon-12 in the combustion chamber of a SI engine. Laser Rayleigh scattering was applied for this remote, nonintrusive and highly space- and time-resolved measurement. The original engine was modified to introduce YAG laser-induced sheet light into the combustion chamber and the scattered light was captured by a CCD camera fitted with a gated double-microchannel plate image intensifier. The results showed that the fuel vapor concentration was highly heterogeneous during the intake stroke and the inhomogeneity decreased in the compression stroke. But, even at the end of the compression stroke, a number of small lumps of inhomogeneous mixture still existed randomly in the engine combustion chamber, which is assumed to cause the heterogeneity of the mixture strength field at the spark discharge.

An experimental study on emission formation processes, such as these of nitric oxide, particulate and total hydrocarbon in a small direct injection (D.I.) diesel engine was carried out by using a newly developed total in-cylinder sampling technique. The sampling method consisted of rapidly opening a blowdown valve attached to the bottom of the piston bowl, and quickly transferring most of the in-cylinder contents into a large sampling chamber below the piston. No modification of the intake and exhaust ports in a cylinder head was required for the installation of the blowdown apparatus. The sampling experiment gave a history of spatially-averaged emission concentrations in the cylinder. The effects of several engine variables, such as the length-to-diameter ratio of the nozzle hole, the ratio of the piston bowl diameter to the cylinder bore and the intake swirl ratio, on the emission formation processes were investigated.

Using synchrotron x-radiography and mass deconvolution techniques, this work reveals strikingly interesting structural and dynamic characteristics of the direct injection (DI) gasoline hollow-cone sprays in the near-nozzle region. Employed to measure the sprays, x-radiography allows quantitative determination of the fuel distribution in this optically impenetrable region with a time resolution of better than 1 μs, revealing the most detailed near-nozzle mass distribution of a DI gasoline fuel spray ever detected. Based on the x-radiographs of the spray collected from four different perspectives, enhanced mathematical and numerical analyses were developed to deconvolute the mass density of the gasoline hollow-cone spray. This leads to efficient and accurate regression curve fitting of the measured experimental data to obtain essential parameters of the density distribution that are then used in reconstructing the cross-sectional density distribution at various times and locations.

Most previous measurements of diesel sprays have yielded few details regarding the near-nozzle structure of the sprays. X-ray radiography measurements have provided quantitative, time-resolved measurements of spray behavior, but the radiography data are projections of the actual fuel distribution. In this study, diesel sprays from two axial, single-hole nozzles are measured using x-ray radiography from several viewing angles. A model-based reconstruction is used to determine the actual density distribution from the projected data. The spray from the hydroground nozzle is eccentric and relatively dense, while the spray from the non-hydroground nozzle is asymmetric and far less dense. Even several mm from the nozzles, the calculated density values are high enough to call into question the assumptions underlying many standard CFD spray models.

Experiments and modeling of a spray impinged onto a cavity wall of a simulated piston were performed under simulated diesel engine conditions (pressure and density) at an ambient temperature. The diesel fuel was delivered from a Bosch-type injection pump to a single-hole nozzle, the hole being drilled in the same direction as the original five-hole nozzle. The fuel was injected into a high-pressure bomb in which an engine combustion chamber, composed of a piston, a cylinder head and a cylinder liner, was installed. Distributions of the spray impinged on the simulated combustion chamber were observed from various directions while changing some of the experimental parameters, such as combustion chamber shape, nozzle projection and top-clearance. High-speed photography was used in the constant volume bomb to examine the effect of these parameters on the spray distributions.

Three-Dimensional visualization technique based on volume rendering method has been developed in order to translate a calculated result of diesel combustion simulation into an realistically spray and flame image. This paper presents an overview of diesel combustion model which has been developed at Hiroshima University, a description of the three-dimensional visualization technique, and some examples of spray and flame image generated by this visualization technique.

The injection amount per stage in a multiple injection strategy is smaller than a conventional single-stage injection. In this paper, the effect of the injection amount (0.27mg, 0.89mg, 2.97mg) under 100MPa injection pressure and the effect of injection pressure (100MPa, 150MPa, 170MPa) under different injection amounts (0.27mg, 2.97mg) on the spray and mixture formation characteristics were studied by analyzing the vapor/liquid phase concentration distributions obtained under various conditions via using the tracer LAS technique. The spray was injected into a high-pressure and high-temperature constant volume vessel by using a single-hole nozzle with a diameter 0.133mm. The higher the injection pressure with a smaller injection amount is, the shorter the spray tip penetration and leaner air-fuel mixture occur. The combustion processes had been examined by a high-speed video camera with the two-color pyrometry method.

An experimental and numerical study was conducted on the spray and mixture properties of a hole-type injector for direct injection (D. I.) gasoline engines. The Laser Absorption Scattering (LAS) technique was adopted to simultaneously measure the spatial concentration distributions and the mass of the liquid and vapor phases in the fuel spray injected into a high-pressure and high-temperature constant volume vessel. The experimental results were compared to the numerical calculation results using three-dimensional CFD and the multi-objective optimization. In the numerical simulation, the design variable of the spray model was optimized by choosing spray tip penetration, and mass of liquid and vapor phases as objective functions.

Different ethanol-gasoline blended fuels, namely the E0 (100% gasoline), E85 (85% ethanol and 15% gasoline mixed in volume basis) and E100 (100% ethanol) were injected by a valve-covered-orifice (VCO) hole-type nozzle in a condition simulating the near top dead center (TDC). Two typical injection pressures of 10 and 20MPa were adopted to clarify the spray and flame behaviors. The correlation of the upstream unburned fuel and the flame propagation was analyzed by the high-speed imaging of shadowgraph. Moreover, the effects of ignition timing and location on the flame propagation were discussed based on the imaging of OH* chemiluminescence.

Experimental and computational studies were carried out to characterize the spray development and evaporation processes of multi-hole injector for direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines. The main injector parameter to be investigated in this study is a diverging angle between neighboring two holes. In the experimental study, the influence of the diverging angle on evaporation process of fuel spray from two-hole injector was investigated using Laser Absorption Scattering (LAS) measurement. Smaller diverging angle causes larger spray tip penetration because the momentum of the spray from one hole emphasizes another, when two spray merge to one. Moreover, spray tip penetration decreases at certain diverging angle due to the negative pressure region between two sprays. Mechanisms behind the above spray behaviors were discussed using the detailed information on the spray and ambient gas flow fields obtained by the three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Reduction of orifice diameter of nozzle is advantageous to the fuel atomization in a D.I. diesel engine. However, the diameter reduction is usually accompanied with decrease of spray tip penetration, thus worsening fuel spatial-distribution and fuel-air mixing. In this paper, a group-hole nozzle concept was proposed to solve the problem resulting from minimization of orifice diameter. Compared to the conventional multi-hole nozzle, group-hole nozzle has a series group of orifices, and each group consists of two micro-orifices with a small spatial interval and small angle. For examining the characteristics of the spray injected by the group-hole nozzle, the ultraviolet-visible laser absorption-scattering (LAS) imaging technique was adopted to determine vapor concentration and droplets density as well as other spray characteristics such as spray angle and penetration of both vapor and liquid phases.

The objectives of this study are to investigate the effects of premixed charge compression ignition (PCCI) strategies with split injection on soot emission characteristics. The split injection conditions included three injection intervals (1.1 ms, 1.3 ms, and 1.5 ms) and three injection quantity fraction ratios (Q1/Q2 = 10.0/14.6 mm3/st, 15.2/9.4 mm3/st, and 20.0/4.6 mm3/st). The results in real engine tests showed that shorter injection intervals, and the 1st injection quantity contributes to reduced soot emissions. A rig test with high-pressure and high-temperature constant-volume vessel (CVV) and a two-dimensional (2D) model piston cavity were used to determine correlations between injection conditions and soot emissions. During the rig test, fuel was injected into the CVV by a single-hole nozzle under split injection strategies. The injection strategies include the same injection intervals and quantity fraction ratios as in the real engine test.