PIV measurements of entrainment process of directly injected media in internal combustion engines

Abstract

PIV measurements have been successfully applied to various flow fields relating internal combustion engines such as in-cylinder air motion, air flow in an intake port, and even a discharging passage of an ignition plug. Measurements of induced air motion around diesel sprays can be said to be a significant example of the PIV applications because the air motion is reflected in an unsteady complicated flow structure. Instead of the apparent entrainment exaggerated by spray droplet dispersing, substantial air entrainment through momentum exchange between liquid and gas was finally obtained by combining PIV and spray profile observation.

PIV measurements of this kind were extensionally applied to other direct fluid injection by the authors. The second object was a high-pressure gas jet directly injected under gas pressure as high as 30 MPa. It was found the gas jet has strong air entrainment through momentum exchange in a single gaseous phase between fuel gas and ambient air. The third directly injected medium in internal combustion engines should be torch flame ejected from nozzle holes of a pre-combustion chamber (PCC) to a main combustion chamber (MCC) of a so-called DF (dual-fuel) engine.

In this study, mixture entrainment process of torch flames is discussed on the PIV results for the first time. However, chamber configurations of a real DF engine are hard to simulate since it
requires several auxiliary PCC devices such as an ignition plug, a sub gas injector, and so on. All of them should be actuated synchronously with an engine crank angle. In the case of a constant volume vessel (CVV), the synchronization is not necessary, but the mixture control in the PCC becomes problematic because of the lack of compression and expansion strokes that assures PCC
gas exchange. For overcoming the situation, rupture of a membrane was introduced in this study. The membrane turns the upper part of the PCC into an air pressure reservoir and low-pressure air jets eject from the nozzle holes after a solenoid-driven needle pierces the membrane for rupturing. The differential pressure between the upper chamber and the lower one was chosen as a main parameter of the experiment.

Since the measurements and analysis of the entrainment of the low-pressure air jets are yet to finalize, the outlook of the CVV, the PIV specifications, and prime results of the air entrainment are attached herewith. After all, the PIV measurements revealed essential difference among air entrainment processes of the above three directly injected media in internal combustion engines.