Douglas E. Longman

Long-term petroleum prices and increasingly-stringent emissions regulations are driving manufacturers and users alike to consider alternatives to diesel-fueled engines. Mixing controlled combustion of alcohol fuels, such as ethanol and methanol, has been identified as a promising technology based the low propensity for particulate and NOx production. However, the higher heats of

Mixing controlled combustion of alcohol fuels has been identified as a promising technology based on their low propensity for particulate and NOx production, but the higher heats of vaporization and auto-ignition temperatures of these fuels make their direct use in diesel engine architectures a challenge. To realize the potential of alcohol-fueled combustion, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling framework is developed, validated, and exercised to identify designs that maximize engine thermal efficiency. To evaluate the use of thermal barrier coatings (TBCs), a simplified one-dimensional (1D) conjugate heat transfer (CHT) modeling framework is employed. The addition of the 1D CHT model only increases the computational expense by 15% relative to traditional approaches, yet offers more accurate heat transfer predictions over constant temperature boundary conditions. The validated model is then used to explore a range of injector orientations and piston bowl geometries. Using a design of experiments (DoE) approach, several designs were identified that improved fuel–air mixing, shortened the combustion duration, and increased thermal efficiency. The most promising design was fabricated and tested in a Caterpillar 1Y3700 single-cylinder oil test engine (SCOTE). Engine testing confirmed the findings from the CFD simulations and found that the co-optimized injector and piston bowl design yielded over 2-percentage point increase in thermal efficiency at the same equivalence ratio (0.96) and over 6-percentage point increase at the same engine load (10.1 bar indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP)), while satisfying design constraints for peak pressure and maximum pressure rise rate.

Lean combustion is a promising strategy to increase thermal efficiency in an internal combustion engine, by exploiting a favorable specific heat ratio of the fresh mixture while simultaneously suppressing the heat losses to the cylinder wall. However, unstable ignition and slow flame propagation at fuel-lean conditions lead to large cycle-to-cycle variability and limit the high-efficiency engine operating range. Prechamber ignition is considered an effective concept to extend the lean operating limit, by providing spatially distributed ignition with multiple turbulent flame-jets and enabling a faster combustion rate compared to the conventional spark ignition approach. From a numerical modeling standpoint to date science base and available simulation tools are inadequate to properly understand and predict the combustion processes in prechamber ignited engines. In this paper, conceptually different Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) combustion models widely adopted in the engine modeling community are used to simulate the ignition and combustion processes in a medium-duty natural gas engine with a prechamber spark-ignition system. A flamelet-based turbulent combustion model, i.e., G-equation, and a multizone well-stirred reactor model are employed for this modeling study. Simulation results are compared with experimental data in terms of in-cylinder pressure and heat release rate. Finally, the analysis of the performance of the two models is carried out to highlight the strengths and limitations of the two evaluated approaches.

Fuel injectors often feature cavitation because of large pressure gradients, which in some regions lead to extremely low pressures. The main objective of this work is to compare the prediction capabilities of two multiphase flow approaches for modeling cavitation in small nozzles, like those used in high-pressure diesel or gasoline fuel injectors. Numerical results are assessed against quantitative high resolution experimental data collected at Argonne National Laboratory using synchrotron X-ray radiography of a model nozzle. One numerical approach uses a homogeneous mixture model with the volume of fluid (VOF) method, in which phase change is modeled via the homogeneous relaxation model (HRM). The second approach is based on the multifluid nonhomogeneous model and uses the Rayleigh bubble-dynamics model to account for cavitation. Both models include three components, i.e., liquid, vapor, and air, and the flow is compressible. Quantitatively, the amount of void predicted by the multifluid model is in good agreement with measurements, while the mixture model overpredicts the values. Qualitatively, void regions look similar and compare well with the experimental measurements. Grid converged results have been achieved for the prediction of mass flow rate while grid-convergence for void fraction is still an open point. Simulation results indicate that most of the vapor is produced at the nozzle entrance. In addition, downstream along the centerline, void due to expansion of noncondensable gases has been identified. The paper also includes a discussion about the effect of turbulent pressure fluctuations on cavitation inception.