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Increasingly stringent emission legislation as well as increased demand on fuel efficiency calls for further research and development in the diesel engine field. Spray formation, evaporation and ignition delay are important factors that influence the combustion and emission formation processes in a diesel engine. Increased understanding of the mixture formation process is valuable in the development of low emission, high efficiency diesel engines. In this paper spray formation and ignition under real engine conditions have been studied in an optical engine capable of running close to full load for a real HD diesel engine. Powerful external lights were used to provide the required light intensity for high speed camera images in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. A specially developed software was used for spray edge detection and tracking. The software provides crank angle resolved spray penetration data.

A simplified combustion and emission formation model for diesel engines has been developed in a project where the long term objective is to predict emissions during transient operation. The intended application implies that the final model must be both computationally inexpensive and comprehensive so that it can be used for optimization of engine control variables when coupled to full-engine simulation software. As starting point, the proposed model uses diesel spray correlations established in combustion vessels regarding spray penetration, dispersion, gas entrainment, ignition and flame lift-off. It has been found that with minor adaption, these correlations are valid also for combustion in an engine. By assuming a fully mixing controlled combustion after ignition and by use of simplified emission models, the correlations have been found useful for predicting trends in engine-out emission with low computational cost.

The fuel injection process plays an important role in the combustion and emission formation processes of the DI diesel engine. One important fuel spray characteristic is the spray impulse. The most commonly used method to measure fuel spray impulse is the impingement method where the fuel spray impinges perpendicularly on the surface of a force transducer. This work deals with the theoretical background of such measurements as well as with developing and testing some different impulse measurement setups. The measured impulse is compared to measurements of the instantaneous mass flow and theoretical flow calculations. When measuring the impulse by impingement on the transducer membrane a fuel temperature related measurement error was encountered. This problem was solved by gluing a strike plate to the transducer membrane. The plate shielded the membrane from direct contact with the fuel.