No abstract

No abstract

Recent pressures on vehicle manufacturers to reduce their average fleet levels of CO 2 emissions have resulted in an increased drive to improve fuel economy and enable use of fuels developed from renewable sources that can achieve a net reduction in the CO 2 output of each vehicle. The most popular choice for spark-ignition engines has been the blending of ethanol with gasoline, where the ethanol is derived either from agricultural or cellulosic sources such as sugar cane, corn or decomposed plant matter. However, other fuels, such as butanol, have also arisen as potential candidates due to their similarities to gasoline, e.g. higher energy density than ethanol. To extract the maximum benefits from these new fuels through optimized engine design and calibration, an understanding of the behaviour of these fuels in modern engines is necessary. In particular, the use of direct injection spark-ignition technology requires spray formation and combustion characteristics to be quantified in order to improve both injector design and operating strategies. To this end an optical investigation of spray development and combustion was undertaken in a single-cylinder direct-injection spark-ignition engine with a centrally mounted multi-hole injector. Specifically, crank-angle resolved imaging studies were performed and batches of images from 100 consecutive cycles were acquired with synchronised in-cylinder pressure logging. The engine was motored and fired at 1500 RPM stoichiometrically under part load (0.5 bar intake pressure), with injection timing set early in the intake stroke to promote homogeneous mixture formation. The effects were investigated at engine coolant temperatures of 20 °C and 90 °C using gasoline, iso-octane, ethanol and butanol. Projected spray areas as seen through the piston crown were calculated to reveal information about the atomization and evaporation processes for each fuel. Additionally, flame areas and centroids were calculated to analyse the combustion process relative to measured in-cylinder pressure histories.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The latest generation of fuel systems for direct-injection spark-ignition engines uses injection nozzles that accommodate a number of holes with various angles in order to offer flexibility in in-cylinder fuel targeting over a range of engine operating conditions. However, the high-injection pressures that are needed for efficient fuel atomisation can lead to deteriorating effects with regards to engine exhaust emissions (e.g. unburned hydrocarbons and particulates) from liquid fuel impingement onto the piston and liner walls. Eliminating such deteriorating effects requires fundamental understanding of in-cylinder spray development processes, taking also into account the diversity of future commercial fuels that can contain significant quantities of bio-components with very different chemical and physical properties to those of typical liquid hydrocarbons. This paper presents high-speed imaging results of spray impingement onto the liner of a direct-injection spark-ignition engine, as well as crank-angle resolved wall heat flux measurements at the observed locations of fuel impingement for detailed characterisation of levels and timing of impingement. The tests were performed in a running engine at 1500 RPM primarily at low load (0.5 bar intake pressure) using 20, 50 and 90 °C engine temperatures. Gasoline, iso-Octane, Butanol, Ethanol and a blend of 10% Ethanol with 90% Gasoline (E10) were used to encompass a range of current and future fuel components for spark-ignition engines. The collected data were analysed to extract mean and standard deviation statistics of spray images and heat flux signals. The results were also interpreted with reference to physical properties and evaporation rates predicted by a single droplet model for all fuels tested.3