This paper presents a new in-cylinder mixture preparation and ignition system for various gaseous fuels including hydrogen. The system consists of a centrally located directinjection (DI) injector and a jet ignition (JI) device for combustion of the main chamber (MC) mixture. The fuel is injected in the MC with a new-generation, fast-actuating, high-pressure, high-flowrate DI injector capable of injection shaping and multiple events. This injector produces a bulk lean stratified mixture. The JI system uses a second DI injector to inject a small amount of fuel in a small pre-chamber (PC). A spark plug then ignites a slightly rich mixture. The MC mixture is then bulk ignited through multiple jets of hot reacting gases. Bulk ignition and combustion of the lean jet-controlled stratified MC mixture resulting from coupling DI with JI makes it possible to burn MC mixtures with fuel-to-air equivalence ratios reducing almost to zero for a throttleless control of load diesel-like and high efficiencies over almost the full range of loads. Computations are performed with hydrogen as the PC and MC fuel.
Jet ignition and direct fuel injection are potential enablers of higher-efficiency, cleaner internal combustion engines (ICEs), where very lean mixtures of gaseous fuels could be burned with pollutants formation below Euro 6 levels, efficiencies approaching 50 per cent full load, and small efficiency penalties operating part load. The lean-burn direct-injection (DI) jet ignition ICE uses a fuel injection and mixture ignition system consisting of one main-chamber DI fuel injector and one small jet ignition pre-chamber per engine cylinder. The jet ignition pre-chamber is connected to the main chamber through calibrated orifices and accommodates a second DI fuel injector. In the spark plug version, the jet ignition pre-chamber includes a spark plug which ignites the slightly rich pre-chamber mixture which then, in turn, bulk ignites the ultra-lean stratified main-chamber mixture through the multiple jets of hot reacting gases entering the in-cylinder volume. The paper uses coupled computer-aided engineering and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to provide better details of the operation of the jet ignition pre-chamber (analysed so far with downstream experiments or stand-alone CFD simulations), thus resulting in a better understanding of the complex interactions between chemistry and turbulence that govern the pre-chamber flow and combustion.
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