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The strategies adopted to control the combustion in Diesel applications play a key role when dealing with current and future requirements of automotive market for Diesel powertrain systems. The traditional “open loop” control approach aims to achieve a desired combustion behaviour by indirect manipulation of the system boundary conditions (e.g. fresh air mass, fuel injection). On the contrary, the direct measurement of the combustion process, e.g. by means of in-cylinder pressure sensor, offers the possibility to achieve the same target “quasi” automatically all over the vehicle lifetime in widely different operating conditions. Beside the traditional combustion control in closed loop (i.e. based on inner torque and/or combustion timing), the exploitation of in-cylinder pressure signal offers a variety of possible further applications, e.g. smart detection of Diesel fuel quality variation, control of combustion noise, modeling engine exhaust emission (e.g. NOx).

In order to study the effects of air bulk motion and methane injection strategies on the development and pollutant levels of dual-fuel combustion, an intense experimental campaign was performed on a diesel common rail research engine with variable inlet configurations. Activating only the swirl or the tumble inlet valve of the engine, or both of them, it was possible to obtain, inside the cylinder, three different bulk flow structures. The air-methane mixture was obtained injecting the gaseous fuel into the inlet manifold varying its pressure and the injector position, either very close to the inlet valves, in order to obtain a stratified-like mixture, or more upstream, to obtain a homogeneous-like mixture. By combining the two different positions of the injector and the three air bulk flow structures, seven different inlet setup have been tested, at different values of engine speed and load.

The effects of several operating parameters on dual fuel combustion at light load were investigated by means of direct endoscopic observation of the process. Therefore, an intense experimental campaign was performed on a single cylinder diesel common rail research engine, converted to operate in dual fuel mode and equipped with optical accesses and variable intake configuration. Three bulk flow structures of the charge were induced inside the cylinder by activating/deactivating the two different inlet valves of the engine (i.e. swirl and tumble). Methane was injected into the inlet manifold at different pressure levels and varying the injector position. In order to obtain a stratified-like air-methane mixture, the injector was mounted very close to the inlet valve, while, to obtain a homogeneous-like one, methane was injected more upstream.