Daming Liu

The turbulent boundary layer flow in internal combustion (IC) engines has a significant effect on the in-cylinder flow and the wall heat transfer. A detailed analysis of the in-cylinder near-wall flow was carried out on an optical steady flow test bench by using high-resolution particle image velocimetry (PIV) in order to characterize the in-cylinder boundary layer flow in this study. The difference between the in-cylinder boundary layer and the canonical turbulent boundary layer was analyzed. The experimental results show that small-scale vortices with a length scale of about 1–2 mm in the instantaneous flow fields appeared in the wall jet region due to the entrainment of the free jet in the outer region of the wall jet. The viscous sublayer thickness decreased from 0.5 mm to 0.3 mm as the valve lift increased from 2.32 mm to 7.975 mm and the pressure drop from 0.5 kPa to 1 kPa. The dimensionless velocity profile is in good agreement with the law of the wall in the viscous sublayer. However, no obvious logarithmic law distribution region was observed in the logarithmic layer. The distribution of the Reynolds stress and the turbulent kinetic energy is similar to that of the canonical turbulent boundary layer. But the Reynolds stress had a much larger magnitude because the turbulent velocity measured in this boundary layer included not only the turbulence generated by wall shear but also the large-scale turbulent vortices caused by the wall jet.

In order to study the in-cylinder flow characteristics, one hundred consecutive cycles of velocity flow fields were investigated numerically by large eddy simulation, and the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) algorithm was used to decompose the results. The computed flow fields were divided into four reconstructed parts, namely mean part, coherent part, transition part, and turbulent part. Then, the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) algorithm was used to analyze the characteristics of the reconstructed fields. The results show that DMD method is capable of finding the dominant frequencies in every reconstructed flow part and identifying the flow structures at equilibrium state. In addition, the DMD results also reveal that the reconstructed parts are related to each other through the break-up and attenuation process of unstable flow structures, while the flow energy cascade occurs among these parts through different scale vortex generation and dissipation process.

An investigation into in-cylinder swirl and tumble flow characteristics with reduced maximum valve lifts (MVL) is presented. The experimental work was conducted in the modified four-valve optical spark-ignition (SI) test engine with three different MVL. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was employed for measuring in-cylinder air motion and measurement results were analyzed for examining flow field, swirl and tumble ratio variation and fluctuating kinetic energy distribution. Results of ensemble-averaged flow fields show that reduced MVL could produce strong swirl flow velocity, then resulted in very regular swirl motion in the late stage of the intake process. The strong swirl flow can maintain very well until the late compression stage. The reduction of MVL can also increase both high-frequency and low-frequency swirl flow fluctuating kinetic energy remarkably. Regarding tumble flow, results demonstrate that lower MVLs result in more horizontal intake flow velocity vectors which can be easily detected under the valve seat area. Although the result of lower MVLs show a higher tumble ratio when the piston is close to the bottom dead centre (BDC), higher MVLs substantially produce higher tumble ratios which can be confirmed when most cylinder area lies in the measuring range.