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This paper deals with a numerical investigation on swirl generation by a helical intake port and its effects on in-cylinder flow characteristics with axisymmetric piston bowls in a small four-valve direct injection diesel engine. The novelty of this study is in determining the appropriate design and orientation of the helical port to generate high swirl. A commercial CFD software STAR-CD is used to perform the detailed three dimensional simulations. Preliminary studies were carried out at steady state conditions with the helical port which demonstrated a good swirl potential and the CFD predictions were found to have reasonably good agreement with the experimental data taken from literature. For transient cold flow simulations, the STAR-CD code was validated with Laser Doppler Velocimetry (LDV) experimental velocity components’ measurements available in literature.

In gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines, air-fuel mixture homogeneity plays a major role on engine performance, especially in combustion and emission characteristics. The performance of the engine largely depends on various engine operating parameters viz., start of injection, duration of injection and spark timing. In order to achieve faster results CFD is becoming a handy tool to optimize and understand the effect of these parameters. Therefore, this study aims on evaluating the two injection parameters viz., single and split injection to evaluate different flame characteristics. Novelty in this study is to define five different parameters which are called α, β, γ, δ and η the details of which are explained in the paper. In order to understand the flame characteristics, these five parameters are found to be very useful. In the present study, a single-cylinder, two-valve, four- stroke engine which is used in two-wheelers in India is considered for carrying out the CFD analysis.

Gasoline direct injection (GDI) technology is already in use in four wheeler applications owing to the additional benefits in terms of better combustion and fuel economy. The air-assisted in-cylinder injection is the emerging technology for gasoline engines which works with low pressure injection systems unlike gasoline direct injection (GDI) system. GDI systems use high pressure fuel injection, which provides better combustion and reduced fuel consumption. It envisages small droplet size and low penetration rate which will reduce wall wetting and hydrocarbon emissions. This study is concerned with a CFD analysis of an air-assisted injection system to evaluate mixture spray characteristics. For the analysis, the air injector fitted onto a constant volume chamber (CVC) maintained at uniform pressure is considered. The analysis is carried out for various CVC pressures, mixture injection durations and fuel quantities so as to understand the effect on mixture spray characteristics.

Air motion inside the engine cylinder plays a predominant role on combustion and emission processes. An attempt has been made in this investigation to simulate the in-cylinder air motion in a DI diesel engine with four different piston configurations such as dome piston, bowl on dome and pentroof piston and pentroof offset bowl piston. For computational analysis, the commercial general purpose code STAR-CD Es-ice has been used, which works on the method of finite volume. To validate the simulation, qualitative and quantitative comparisons have been done with the PIV results available in the literature. From this study, the best possible piston configuration has been arrived at.

In modern direct injection gasoline engines, air-fuel mixing has a strong influence on combustion and emission characteristics, which in turn largely depends on in-cylinder fluid motion. However, in-cylinder fluid motion dependent on many engine parameters viz., piston shape, engine speed, intake manifold orientation, compression ratio, fuel injection timing, duration, etc. Among them, piston shape has significant influence on the in-cylinder fluid motion. Therefore, this study aims on evaluating the effect of piston shape on in-cylinder flows in a direct injection engine using CFD. In this study, a single-cylinder, two-valve, four-stroke direct injection engine designed for two-wheeler application in India is considered for the analysis. ‘STAR-CD’ and és-ice’ are used for CFD analysis. Pressure boundary values obtained from measurements in the actual engine are employed. Two piston-shapes viz., flat and bowl types at wide-open-throttle under non-firing conditions are considered.

Direct injection diesel engines are used in both light duty and heavy duty vehicles because of higher thermal efficiency compared to SI engines. However, due to only short time available for fuel-air mixing, combustion process depends on proper mixing. As a result, DI Diesel engine emits more NOx and soot into the atmosphere. Therefore, to achieve better combustion with less emission and also to accelerate the fuel-air mixing to improve the combustion, appropriate design of combustion chamber is crucial. Hence, in this work a study has been carried out using CFD to evaluate the effect of combustion chamber configuration on Diesel combustion with two different piston bowls. The two different piston configurations considered in this study are centre bowl on flat piston and pentroof offset bowl piston.

This paper presents the details of the study to optimize and arrive at a design base for a vacuum pump in an automotive engine using resilient back propagation algorithm for Artificial Neural Networking (ANN). The reason for using neural networks is to capture the accuracy of experimental data while saving computational time, so that system simulations can be performed within a reasonable time frame. Vacuum Pump is an engine driven part. Design and optimization of a vacuum pump in an automotive engine is crucial for development. The NN predicted values had a good correlation with the actual values of tested proto sample. The design optimization by means of this study has served the purpose of generating the data base for future development of different capacity vacuum pumps.

The fuel injection timing is one of the most important operating parameters that affect the atomization, mixture formation and combustion which determines the performance and emissions of a gasoline engine. Optimizing the injection timing will improve the performance of the engine to a large extend. Towards this end artificial neural-network (ANN) technique using Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) training algorithm is used to train and optimize the fuel injection timing of a single cylinder, four-stroke gasoline engine. Experimental studies have been carried out to obtain training as well as test data. For various engine speeds between 700 and 5000 rpm and for different manifold absolute pressures, fuel injection timing was measured by conducting experiments. The experimental data set generated is used to train the neural network to arrive at the optimized performance of the engine.

Nowadays, due to the stringent engine emission norms, an efficient technique is required to reduce oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from automobiles especially from the lean burn engines. Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) is found to be an efficient after treatment method used to reduce oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from the exhaust. However, for light duty vehicles, because of the limited size of the catalysts, ammonia slip nullifies its advantages. Lack of uniformity of ammonia at the SCR monolith entrance causes ammonia slip. This study addresses the effect of injection parameters, location of injector and shape of injector upon the flow parameters, exhaust gas temperature and flow rate. The results obtained from this study provide useful guidelines for optimizing the injection parameters to avoid the ammonia slip. The evaporation of Urea Water Solution (UWS) is also investigated.

In order to achieve good fuel spray characteristics, proper placing of the fuel injector in the intake manifold in port fuel injected (PFI) gasoline engines is very crucial. In automotive PFI engines, vehicle layout may be a constraint to mount the fuel injector in best possible location and inclination. In general, PFI engines use straight spray fuel injection. However, if there is a vehicle layout constraint, then inclined fuel spray may be suitable which is not very common. Hence, it is important to understand the effect of fuel spray inclination on fuel spray characteristics. In this study, a CFD analysis has been carried out for the four inclinations of fuel spray and the results are compared. The geometrical modeling of the fuel injector is done using ProE software. It is meshed with polyhedral cells and mesh refinement is done wherever required. Inlet air velocity and exit pressure of intake pipe at wide-open-throttle conditions are used as boundary conditions.

Oil with high free fatty acid (FFA) content may not be an appropriate contestant for biodiesel production due to poor process yield. The high FFA content (≻1%) will cause soap formation and the separation of products will be exceedingly difficult, and as a result, it has low yield of biodiesel product. In order to increase the process yield, pretreatment setup is required. This involves additional cost and will increase overall fuel price. Hence crude vegetable oils having high FFA can be blended with diesel for effectual employment in diesel engines. In this context, Jatropha Curcas L, non-edible tree-based oil with higher FFA content, can be considered as one of the prominent blending sources for diesel. The primary objective of the present work is to analyze the effect of FFA content of crude Jatropha Curcas L oil (CJO) on performance and emission characteristics of a direct injection (DI) diesel engine.

Of late direct injection engines are replacing carburetted and port injected engines due to their high thermal efficiency and fuel economy. One of the reasons for the increased fuel economy is the ultra lean mixture with which the engine operates under low loads. Under the low load conditions, the air fuel ratio of the mixture near the spark plug is close to stoichiometric values while the overall mixture is lean, which is called stratified mixture. In order to achieve this, proper air motion during the late stages of compression is a must. Quality of the mixture depends on the time of injection as well as the type of fuel injector and mixture preparation strategy used. Engines employing air guided mixture preparation are considered as the second generation engines. For understanding the efficient mixture preparation method, three types of flow structures like base (low tumble), high tumble and inclined swirl are created inside the engine cylinder using shrouds on the intake valves.

Increasing the efficiency of engine auxiliary systems have become a challenge. Oil pump, identified for this study, is one such engine system which is used for lubrication of engine parts. To achieve higher efficiencies, there is a need for math-based analysis and design. This can be achieved by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The main aim of this paper is to simulate the flow through Gerotor Oil pump using Computational Fluid Dynamics. A 3D model of the entire flow domain is created and meshed in preprocessor GAMBIT. The mesh for various pressure outlet conditions is exported to FLUENT solver for analysis. The predicted results are validated with the experimental results. The comparison shows that the CFD predictions are in good agreement with experimental results. In particular, such a simulation offers a scope for visualizing the flow through the Gerotor oil pump.

Of late Direct Injection Spark Ignition (DISI) engines are replacing the carburetted SI engines due to certain inherent advantages like uniform distribution of fuel-air mixture in all cylinders in multi cylinder engines. However the homogeneity of the mixture depends on the time of injection as well as the type of fuel injector. It is expected that late in the compression stroke the fuel-air mixture near the spark plug should be a combustible mixture. In order to achieve this, proper air motion during induction and compression is a must. Further the interaction of fuel and air from the start of injection is equally important. This paper addresses these issues. For this a CFD study has been carried out. The injection timings selected are 90, 180 and 2700 aTDC, the idea being to understand the effects of early or late injection on fuel air mixing. The appropriate governing equations are solved using finite volume method. RNG k-ε turbulence model is used for physical modelling.

A gas turbine combustion system is an embodiment of all complexities that engineering equipment can have. The flow is three dimensional, swirling, turbulent, two phase and reacting. The design and development of combustors, until recent past, was an art than science. If one takes the route of development through experiments, it is quite time consuming and costly. Compared to the other two components viz., compressor and turbine, the combustion system is not yet completely amenable to mathematical analysis. A gas turbine combustor is both geometrically and fluid dynamically quite complex. The major challenge a combustion engineer faces is the space constraint. As the combustion chamber is sandwiched between compressor and turbine there is a limitation on the available space. The critical design aspect is in facing the aerodynamic challenges with minimum pressure drop. Accurate mathematical analysis of such a system is next to impossible.

The primary purpose of automotive air induction systems (AIS) is to reduce the airborne contaminant level ingested by engines, especially abrasive contaminants which can cause engine wear. A superior air filter performance is necessary for automotive AIS to protect the engine from wear and to provide the engine with required amount of air. The buildup of dust on the filter surface increases the resistance of the filter medium to flow, which in turn increases the pressure drop across the filter. The problem is so severe in high dust environments like off highway application. At present, with numerical techniques it is possible to calculate flow through a filter and predict average pressure loss of the flow knowing the initial properties of the filter medium. In this work an attempt has been made to consider the deposition of dust on the filter and the resulting changes in the filter medium properties, which lead to increasing pressure loss across air filter.

High specific power output diesel engines are used in armoured fighting vehicles and they are generally fitted with conventional fuel injection pumps. These pumps are usually with mechanical variable speed governors. Apart from its primary function of speed regulation they are required to perform a variety of tasks like fuel regulation depending upon turbo boost pressure, coolant temperature and engine shut off at low lubrication oil pressure. These are not easily achievable by conventional mechanical governors. Electronic governing systems coupled to mechanical conventional fuel injection pump (FIP) and using suitable software can easily meet the above requirements and yet be flexible to meet the demands of different applications. An electronic controller for 1000 HP, 12 cylinder V engine used for a armoured fighting vehicle. An electrical actuator was selected and fitted in the pump by replacing the mechanical governor.

This paper deals mainly with the computer simulation and experimental investigations on a single cylinder, four-stroke, spark ignited, extended expansion engine. The simulation procedure involves thermodynamic and global modeling techniques. Sub-models have been used for predicting heat transfer, friction and gas exchange processes. A two-zone model is adopted for combustion process. Combustion model predicts mass burning rate, ignition delay and combustion duration. It uses sub-models for calculating flame-front area, flamespeed and chemical equilibrium composition of ten product species. Experimentally measured valve-lift data along with suitable coefficient of discharge is used in the analysis of gas exchange process. Unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitric oxide emissions have also been predicted. Experiments have been conducted on a single cylinder, air-cooled, four-stroke, spark-ignition engine.

This paper deals mainly with the computer simulation and experimental investigations on a single cylinder, four stroke, spark ignited, extended expansion engine. The simulation procedure involves thermodynamic and global modeling techniques. Submodels for predicting gas exchange processes, heat transfer and friction are used. Two-zone model is adopted for combustion process. The combustion model predicts mass burning rate, ignition delay and combustion duration. It uses sub-models for calculating flame-front area, flame-speed and chemical equilibrium composition of ten product species. Experimentally measured valve-lift data along with suitable coefficient of discharge is used in the analysis of gas exchange process. Unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitric oxide emissions have also been predicted. Experiments have been conducted on a single cylinder, air cooled, four stroke, spark ignition engine. A production engine was modified to run as extended expansion engine.