Piston bowl combustion simulation - From fuel spray calibration to emissions minimization

Abstract: The current pollution policies in all European and American countries are forcing the industry to movetowards a more efficient and environmentally friendly engines. On the other hand, customers requiremaintaining the power and fuel consumption. Lowering mainly nitrous oxides (NOx) and carbon particles(Soot) is therefore a challenging task with a very strong impact on mainly the automotive andaeronautical market.The purpose of the current work is to research the pollution production of automotive diesel enginesand optimize the fuel injection and piston geometry to lower the emissions. The interaction betweenfuel and air as well as the combustion are the two main physical and chemical processes governing thepollutants formation. Converged-CFD will be the CFD tool employed during the analysis of the previousproblems.The fuel-air interaction is related to jet break up, vaporization and turbulence. The strong dependenceon the surrounding flow field of the previous processes require the equations to be solved numericallywithin a CFD code. The fuel is to be placed in a combustion chamber (piston) where the spray will affectthe surrounding flow field and ultimately the combustion process.In order to accurately represent the nature of the processes, the current work is divided into two mainchapters. Spray modelling and Combustion Modelling. The first will help to accurately model the discretephase (fuel spray) and the vapour entrainment. The second chapter, combustion modelling willretrieve the knowledge gain in the first part to accurately represent the fuel injection in the chamber aswell as the combustion process to ultimately model the pollutants emissions.Finally, a piston bowl optimization will be performed using the previous analysed models and give theindustry a measure of the potential improvement by just adjusting the fuel injection or by modifyingthe piston bowl geometry.