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This paper deals with the influence of a wall soot layer of varying thickness on the unsteady heat transfer between the fluid and the engine cylinder wall during a full cycle of a four-stroke Diesel engine operation. For that purpose a computational investigation has been carried out, using a one-dimensional model of a multi-layer solid wall for simulating the transient response within the confinement of the combustion chamber. The soot layer is thereby of varying thickness over time, depending on the relative rates of deposition and oxidation. Deposition is accounted for due to a thermophoretic mechanism, while oxidation is described by means of an Arrhenius type expression. Results of the computations obtained so far show that the substrate wall temperature has a significant effect on the soot layer dynamics and thus on the wall heat flux to the combustion chamber wall.

Addition of hydrogen-rich gas to gasoline in internal combustion engines is gaining increasing interest, as it seems suitable to reach near-zero emission combustion, able to easily meet future stringent regulations. Bottled gas was used to simulate the output of an on-board reformer (21%H2, 24%CO, 55%N2). Measurements were carried out on a 4-stroke, 2-cylinder, 0.5-liter engine, with EGR, in order to calculate the heat release rate through a detailed two-zone model. A quasi-dimensional model of the flame was developed: it consists of a geometrical estimate of the flame surface, which is then coupled with the heat release rate. The turbulent flame speed can then be inferred. The model was then applied to blends of gasoline with hydrogen-rich gas, showing the effect on the flame speed and transition from laminar to turbulent combustion.

In order to meet future requirements for emission reduction and fuel economy a variety of concepts are available for gasoline engines. In the recent past new pathways have been found using alternative fuels and fuel combinations to establish cost optimized solutions. The presented concept for a SI-engine consists of combined injection of gasoline and hydrogen. A hydrogen enriched gas mixture is being injected additionally to gasoline into the engine manifold. The gas composition represents the output of an onboard gasoline reformer. The simulations and measurements show substantial benefits to improve the combustion process resulting in reduced cold start and warm up emissions and optimized part load operation. The replacement of gasoline by hydrogen-rich gas during engine start leads to zero hydrocarbons in the exhaust gas.

The relative amounts of heat released by premixed and by diffusion controlled combustion is varied in a compression-ignition engine run on the test bench through variation of four operating parameters. Exhaust gas is led to a differential mobility particle sizer and to filters that are loaded for gravimetric analysis. Particle size distributions are acquired in the 16÷630 nm range of electrical mobility diameters. Opacity readings of the exhaust gas are taken, cylinder pressure is indicated, a value for the combustion noise is computed; gaseous emissions are recorded and heat release rates based on cylinder pressure analysis are evaluated. Two full factorial experiments at 2 bar bmep 2000 rpm are run as 24 combinations of four factors: Injection pressure 400 and 1200 bar, with and without pilot injection, 1/3 and 1/4 mass-fraction exhaust gas recirculation, late, middle and early start of injection.

This study presents an application of the conditional moment closure (CMC) combustion model to marine diesel sprays. In particular, the influence of fuel evaporation terms has been investigated for the CMC modeling framework. This is motivated by the fact that substantial overlap between the dense fuel spray and flame area is encountered for sprays in typical large two-stroke marine diesel engines which employ fuel injectors with orifice diameters of the order of one millimeter. Simulation results are first validated by means of experimental data from the Wärtsilä optically accessible marine spray combustion chamber in terms of non-reactive macroscopic spray development. Subsequently, reactive calculations are carried out and validated in terms of ignition delay time, ignition location, flame lift-off length and temporal evolution of the flame region. Finally, the influence of droplet terms on spray combustion is analyzed in detail.

The findings presented in this paper result from a collaboration between two Federal Laboratories in Switzerland. In this research project the characteristics of the particulates from internal combustion engines were investigated in detail. Measurements were carried out on a single-cylinder research engine focusing on exhaust particulate matter emissions. The single-cylinder diesel engine is supercharged and features a common-rail direct injection system. This work analyzes the influence of fuel properties and injection parameters on the particulate number size distribution. For the fuel composition, five different fuels including low sulfur diesel, zero-sulfur and zero-aromatics diesel, two blending portions of oxygenated diesel additive and rapeseedmethylester were used. For the injection parameters the injection pressure, the start of injection and the fuel amount in the pilot- and in the post-injection phases were varied.

We have performed simulations and experiments to characterize the mixture formation in spray-guided direct injected spark ignition (DISI) gasoline engines and to help to understand features of the combustion process, which are characteristic for this engine concept. The 3-D computations are based on the KIVA 3 code, in which basic submodels of spray processes have been systematically modified at ETH during the last years. In this study, the break-up model for the hollow-cone spray typical for DISI engines has been validated through an extended comparison with both shadowgraphs and Mie-scattering results in a high-pressure-high-temperature, constant volume combustion cell at ambient conditions relevant for DISI operation, with and without significant droplet evaporation. Computational results in a single-cylinder research engine have been then obtained at a given engine speed for varying load (fuel mass per stroke), swirl and fuel injection pressure.

The physical behavior of the combustion process in a jet-guided direct injection spark ignition engine has been investigated with three different measurement techniques. These are flame visualization by use of endoscopy, ion-current sensing at 16 different locations in the combustion chamber and the estimation of the flame temperature as well as soot concentration based on multi-wavelength-pyrometry. The results of all these measurement techniques are in good agreement between each other and give a coherent picture of the physical behavior of the combustion process and make it possible to characterize the main influence parameters on combustion. This serves as a basis for validation and improvement of simulation tools for the engine thermodynamics and combustion.

Emission and performance parameters of a medium size, and medium speed D.I. diesel engine equipped with a Miller System, a new developed High Pressure Exhaust Gas Recirculation System (HPEGR), a Common Rail (CR) system and a Turbocharger with Variable Turbine Geometry (VTG) have been measured and compared to the standard engine. While power output, fuel consumption, soot and other emissions are kept constant, nitric oxide emissions could be reduced by 30 to 50% depending on load and for the optimal combination of methods. Heat release rate analysis provides the reasons for the optimised engine behaviour in terms of soot and NOx emissions: The variable Nozzle Turbocharger helps deliver more oxygen to the combustion process (less soot) and lower the peak gas temperature (less NOx).

Ignition systems for large lean burn gas engines are challenged by large energy deposition requirements to ensure stable and reliable inflammation of the premixed charge. In this study, two different ignition systems are investigated experimentally: ignition by means of injecting a small amount of diesel spray and its subsequent autoignition is compared to the ignition with an un-scavenged pre-chamber spark plug over a wide range of engine relevant conditions such as methane equivalence ratios and thermomechanical states. The ignition behavior as well as the combustion phase of the two systems is investigated using an optically accessible Rapid Compression Expansion Machine (RCEM). Filtered OH-chemiluminescence images of the ignition and combustion were taken with a UV intensified high speed camera through the piston window.

Future engine emission legislation regulates soot from Diesel engines strictly and requires improvements in engine calibration, fast response sensor equipment and exhaust gas aftertreatment systems. The in-cylinder phenomena of soot formation and oxidation can be analysed using a pyrometer with optical access to the combustion chamber. The pyrometer collects the radiation of soot particles during diffusion combustion, and allows the calculation of soot temperature and a proportional value for the in-cylinder soot density (KL). A four-cylinder heavy-duty Diesel engine was equipped in all cylinders with prototype pyrometers and state of the art pressure transducers. The cylinder specific data was recorded crank angle-resolved for a set of steady-state and transient operating conditions, as well as exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) addition and over a wide range of soot emissions.

The behavior of spray auto-ignition and combustion of a diesel spray in a lean premixed methane/air charge was investigated. A rapid compression expansion machine with a free-floating piston was employed to reach engine-relevant conditions at start of injection of the micro diesel pilot. The methane content in the lean ambient gas mixture was varied by injecting different amounts of methane directly into the combustion chamber, the ambient equivalence ratio for the methane content ranged from 0.0 (pure air) to 0.65. Two different nozzle tips with three and six orifices were employed. The amount of pilot fuel injected ranged between 0.8 and 1.8 percent of the total energy in the combustion chamber. Filtered OH chemiluminescence images of the combustion were taken with a UV-intensified high-speed camera through the optical access in the piston.

Compact and computationally efficient reaction models capable of accurately predicting ignition delay and heat release rates are a prerequisite for the development of strategies to control and optimize HCCI engines. In particular for full boiling range fuels exhibiting two-stage ignition a tremendous demand exists in the engine development community. To this end, in a previous investigation, a global reaction mechanism was developed and fitted to data from shock tube experiments for n-heptane and five full boiling range fuels. By means of a genetic algorithm, for each of these fuels, a set of reaction rate parameters (consisting of pre-exponential factors, activation energies and concentration exponents) has been defined, without any change to the model form.

The current trend in automobiles is towards electrical vehicles, but for the most part these vehicles still require an internal combustion engine to provide additional range and flexibility. These engines are under stringent emissions regulations, in particular, for the reduction of CO2. Gas engines which run lean burn combustion systems provide a viable route to these emission reductions, however designing these engines to provide sustainable and controlled combustion under lean conditions at λ=2.0 is challenging. To address this challenge, it is possible to use a scavenged Pre-Chamber Ignition (PCI) system which can deliver favorable conditions for ignition close to the spark plug. The lean charge in the main combustion chamber is then ignited by flame jets emanating from the pre-chamber nozzles. Accurate prediction of flame kernel development and propagation is essential for the analysis of PCI systems.

An existing three-stage ignition delay model which has seen successful application to Primary Reference Fuels (PRFs) has been extended to six surrogate fuels which constitute potential candidates for future Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engines. The fuels include petroleum-derived and oxygenated components and can be divided into low, intermediate and high cetane number groups. A new methodology to obtain the model parameters is presented which relies jointly on simulation and experimental data: in a first step, constant volume adiabatic reactor simulations using chemical kinetic mechanisms are performed to generate ignition delays for a very wide range of conditions, namely variations in equivalence ratio, Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), pressure and temperature.

Knock is often the main limiting factor for brake efficiency in spark ignition engines and is mostly attributed to auto-ignition of the unburned mixture in front of the flame. In order to study knock in a systematic way, spark angle sweeps with ethanol and iso-octane have been carried out on single cylinder spark ignition engine with variable intake temperatures at wide open throttle and stoichiometric premixed fuel/air mixtures. Much earlier and stronger knock can be observed for iso-octane compared to ethanol at otherwise same engine operating conditions due to the cooling effect and higher octane number of ethanol, leading to different cycle-to-cycle variation behavior. Detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms are used to compute ignition delay times at conditions relevant to the measurements and are compared to empirical correlations available in literature. The different correlations are used in a knock model approach and are tested against the measurement data.

The interaction of turbulent premixed methane combustion with the surrounding flow field can be studied using optically accessible test rigs such as a rapid compression expansion machine (RCEM). The high flexibility offered by such a test rig allows its operation at various thermochemical conditions at ignition. However, limitations inherent to such test rigs due to the absence of an intake stroke do not allow turbulence production as found in IC-engines. Hence, means to introduce turbulence need to be implemented and the relevant turbulence quantities have to be identified in order to enable comparability with engine relevant conditions. A dedicated high-pressure direct injection of air at the beginning of the compression phase is considered as a measure to generate adjustable turbulence intensities at spark timing and during the early flame propagation.

An optically accessible Rapid Compression Expansion Machine (RCEM) has been used to investigate the homogeneous auto-ignition of five candidate fuels for Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion. Two technical fuels (Naphthas) and three primary reference fuels (PRF), (n-heptane, PRF25 and PRF50) were examined. The Cetane Numbers (CN) of the fuels range from 35 to 56. The PRF25 and PRF50 were selected in order to approximately match the CN of the two Naphthas. Variation of the operating parameters has been performed, in regard to initial charge temperature of 383, 408, and 433K, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rate of 0%, 25%, and 50%, and equivalence ratio of 0.29, 0.38, 0.4, 0.53, 0.57, and 0.8. Pressure indication measurements, OH-chemiluminescence imaging, and passive spectroscopy were simultaneously implemented.

At the Internal Combustion Engines and Combustion Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich we are currently developing low emission strategies for heavy duty diesel engines that engine manufacturers can implement to meet stringent emissions regulations. The technologies being studied include high-pressure fuel injection (with common-rail injection system), multiple injection strategies (with pilot or post injections), turbo charging, exhaust gas recirculation (cooled EGR), oxygenated fuels and the optimization of the air management system. This paper focuses on the effects of exhaust gas recirculation (cooled EGR) in combination with very high injection pressure. Measurements were carried out on a heavy-duty diesel single-cylinder research engine equipped with a modern common rail fuel injection. The engine investigations were conducted in different operating points in the engine map covering wide speed and load ranges.

Numerical simulations of a heavy-duty diesel engine fuelled with n-heptane have been performed with the conditional moment closure (CMC) combustion model and an embedded two-equation soot model. The influence of exhaust gas recirculation on the interaction between post- and main- injection has been investigated. Four different levels of EGR corresponding to intake ambient oxygen volume fractions of 12.6, 15, 18 and 21% have been considered for a constant intake pressure and temperature and unchanged injection configuration. Simulation results have been compared to the experimental data by means of pressure and apparent heat-release rate (AHRR) traces and in-cylinder high-speed imaging of natural soot luminosity and planar laser-induced incandescence (PLII). The simulation was found to reproduce the effect of EGR on AHRR evolutions very well, for both single- and post-injection cases.