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A laboratory-based fuel mixture system capable of delivering a range of fuel/air mixtures has been used to observe the effects of differing mixture characteristics on engine combustion through measurement and analysis of incylinder pressure and exhaust emissions. Fuel air mixtures studied can be classified into four different types: 1) Completely homogeneous fuel/air mixtures, where the fuel has been vaporized and mixed with the air prior to entrance into the normal engine induction system, 2) liquid fuel that is atomized and introduced with the air to the normal engine induction system, 3) liquid fuel that is atomized, and partially prevaporized but the air/fuel charge remains stratified up to introduction to the induction system, and 4) the standard fuel metering system. All tests reported here were conducted under wide open throttle conditions. A four-stroke, spark-ignited, single-cylinder, overhead valve-type engine was used for all tests.

A three-dimensional computer code (KIVA) is being modified to include state-of-the-art submodels for diesel engine flow and combustion: spray atomization, drop breakup/coalescence, multi-component fuel vaporization, spray/wall interaction, ignition and combustion, wall heat transfer, unburned HC and NOx formation, soot and radiation and the intake flow process. Improved and/or new submodels which have been completed are: wall heat transfer with unsteadiness and compressibility, laminar-turbulent characteristic time combustion with unburned HC and Zeldo'vich NOx, and spray/wall impingement with rebounding and sliding drops.

In previous work the KIVA-II code has been modified to model modem DI diesel engines and their emissions of particulate soot and oxides of nitrogen (NOx). This work presents results from a program to further validate the NOx emissions models against engine experiments with a well characterized modern engine. To facilitate a simplified comparison with experiments, a single cylinder research version of the Caterpillar 3406 heavy duty DI diesel engine was retrofitted to run as a naturally-aspirated, propane-fueled, spark-ignited engine. The retrofit includes installing a low compression ratio piston with bowl, adding a gas mixer, replacing the fuel injector assembly with a spark plug assembly and adding spark and fuel stoichiometry control hardware. Cylinder pressure and engine-out NOx emissions were measured for a range of speeds, exhaust gas residual (EGR) fractions, and spark timing settings.

The three-dimensional computer code, KIVA, is being modified to include state-of-the-art submodels for diesel engine flow and combustion. Improved and/or new submodels which have already been implemented are: wall heat transfer with unsteadiness and compressibility, laminar-turbulent characteristic time combustion with unburned HC and Zeldo'vich NOx, and spray/wall impingement with rebounding and sliding drops. Progress on the implementation of improved spray drop drag and drop breakup models, the formulation and testing of a multistep kinetics ignition model and preliminary soot modeling results are described. In addition, the use of a block structured version of KIVA to model the intake flow process is described. A grid generation scheme has been developed for modeling realistic (complex) engine geometries, and initial computations have been made of intake flow in the manifold and combustion chamber of a two-intake-valve engine.