Technical Paper
A CFD Model of Supercritical Water Injection for ICEs as Energy Recovery System
2020-06-30
2020-37-0001
Supercritical water injection for ICEs may be a valid option to recover engine wall heat transfer and energy from exhaust gases, with benefits in terms of efficiency and performances. Water is recovered from exhaust gases and is brought up to supercritical conditions by employing the waste heat during engine operations. A preliminary study of this energy recovery approach has already been performed in an authors’ previous work, by employing a port fuel injection (PFI) internal combustion engine quasi-dimensional model, which has been validated against experimental data, returning satisfactory results in terms of overall efficiency gain. In this work, in order to obtain a more reliable and accurate evaluation of the achievable energy recovery with supercritical water injection, a multidimensional CFD model of the engine has been set and validated. As regards the engine geometry, a simplified axisymmetric engine has been used, in order to reduce the computational time and storage.