Hydrogen is the energy vector that will lead us toward a more sustainable future. It could be the fuel of both fuel cells and internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines are today the only motors characterized by high reliability, duration and specific power, and low cost per power unit. The most immediate solution for the near future could be the application of hydrogen as a fuel in modern internal combustion engines. This solution has advantages and disadvantages: specific physical, chemical and operational properties of hydrogen require attention. Hydrogen is the only fuel that could potentially produce no carbon, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emissions. It also allows high engine efficiency and low nitrogen oxide emissions. Hydrogen has wide flammability limits and a high flame propagation rate, which provide a stable combustion process for lean and very lean mixtures. Near the stoichiometric air–fuel ratio, hydrogen-fueled engines exhibit abnormal combustions (backfire, pre-ignition, detonation), the suppression of which has proven to be quite challenging. Pre-ignition due to hot spots in or around the spark plug can be avoided by adopting a cooled or unconventional ignition system (such as corona discharge): the latter also ensures the ignition of highly diluted hydrogen–air mixtures. It is worth noting that to correctly reproduce the hydrogen ignition and combustion processes in an ICE with the risks related to abnormal combustion, 3D CFD simulations can be of great help. It is necessary to model the injection process correctly, and then the formation of the mixture, and therefore, the combustion process. It is very complex to model hydrogen gas injection due to the high velocity of the gas in such jets. Experimental tests on hydrogen gas injection are many but never conclusive. It is necessary to have a deep knowledge of the gas injection phenomenon to correctly design the right injector for a specific engine. Furthermore, correlations are needed in the CFD code to predict the laminar flame velocity of hydrogen–air mixtures and the autoignition time. In the literature, experimental data are scarce on air–hydrogen mixtures, particularly for engine-type conditions, because they are complicated by flame instability at pressures similar to those of an engine. The flame velocity exhibits a non-monotonous behavior with respect to the equivalence ratio, increases with a higher unburnt gas temperature and decreases at high pressures. This makes it difficult to develop the correlation required for robust and predictive CFD models. In this work, the authors briefly describe the research path and the main challenges listed above.

The aim of this work is to set up a methodology for simulating Common Rail high-pressure injectors based on coupling a lump-model with CFD two-phase multi-dimensional computations. The unit simulated is the Bosch injector. The injector lump-model resulted in the definition of the three sub-models for hydraulics, mechanics and electro-magnetics. The second-order differential governing equations have been solved in Matlab/Simulink environment and are properly coupled together with the one-dimensional partial differential equations that describe the unsteady pipe flow. A detailed library of thermo-mechanical properties for ISO-4113 oil and diesel fuel is included. Cavitation effects on discharge coefficient in the main orifices were accounted for by using results from CFD steady two-phase flow simulations. The evaluation of the model capability was assessed by using detailed experiments carried out at different practical injector operating conditions. Instantaneous and integrated injected flow rate, and injector needle lift were measured and collected for comparison with simulation. CFD steady computations revealed to be unavoidable in driving the lump-model toward a high reliability of injector performances over the whole range of injection pressures and energizing times.

Engine performances are correlated to the overall fluid dynamic characteristics of the injection system that, in turns, are strictly correlated to the fluid dynamic performance of the injector geometry. It is particularly true for actual GDI and Diesel engines where micro-orifice configurations are associated to very high injection pressure.In relation to the Common Rail Diesel engines, over the last decade different injector hole shapes have been tested. Actually, the most used configurations are: cylindrical, k, and ks. In this paper, the performance of all these three injector hole shapes are evaluated in order to find out the influence of orifice conicity and hydro-grinding level on the main fluid dynamic characteristics like cavitation evolution inside the injector as well as the flow properties at nozzle exit. The fluid dynamic behavior of each considered hole is evaluated over the injection time by performing a fully transient CFD multiphase simulation (i.e. the needle motion is reproduced during the simulation). By the proposed simulation methodology, the evaluation of the cavitating flow evolution inside the injector is performed not only from the point of view of the overall spray characteristics emerging from the injector holes but also from the cavitation erosion risk over needle, nozzle, and hole internal surfaces

The paper investigates the variation of the mass of the fuel injected with respect to nominal conditions in Common Rail injection systems for Diesel automotive applications. Two possible operating conditions have been considered: the consecutive injection of two injectors and the multiple shots of the same injector in the same engine cycle. An integrated experimental and numerical methodology has been used. Several experimental information were available in terms of instantaneous rail and pipe pressure and mass flow rate at different conditions. The 1D numerical model of the whole injection system was useful in addressing the questions remained unresolved in the post-experiments analysis. The experimental results show that injector performances are more related to pressure oscillations in injector connecting pipe rather than inside the common rail. The fuel mass is slightly depending on the mutual influence between two consecutive injectors while it is strongly affected by the dwell time (i.e., DTW) between consecutive shots of the same injector in the same engine cycle. The dwell time variation determines different pressure oscillation amplitudes in the injector connecting pipe at the electrical (nominal) start of the injection of the second pulse. As a consequence, different hydraulic (i.e., actual) start and duration of the injection of the second pulse occurs depending on dwell time. A parametric analysis showed that the injected fuel mass variation with dwell time can be reduced by using shorter and larger injector connecting pipes.

Managing the injection rate profile is a powerful tool to control engine performance and emission levels. In particular, Common Rail (C.R.) injection systems allow an almost completely flexible fuel injection event in DI-diesel engines by permitting a free mapping of the start of injection, injection pressure, rate of injection and, in the near future, multiple injections. This research deals with the development of a network-based numerical tool for understanding operating condition limits of the Common Rail injector. The models simulate the electro-fluid-mechanical behavior of the injector accounting for cavitation in the nozzle holes. Validation against experiments has been performed. The model has been used to provide insight into the operating conditions of the injector and in order to highlight the application to injection system design.

An ignition model based on Lagrangian approach was set-up. A lump model for the electrical circuit of the spark plug is used to compute breakdown and glow energy. At the end of shock wave and very first plasma expansion, a spherical kernel is deposited inside the gas flow at spark plug location. A simple model allows one to compute initial flame kernel radius and temperature based on physical mixture properties and spark plug characteristics. The sphere surface of the kernel is discretized by triangular elements which move radially according to a lagrangian approach. Expansion velocity is computed accounting for both heat conduction effect at the highest temperatures and thermodynamic energy balance at relatively lower temperatures. Turbulence effects and thermodynamic properties of the air-fuel mixture are accounted for. Restrikes are possible depending on gas flow velocity and mixture quality at spark location. CFD solver and 1D/lagrangian ignition model are closely coupled at each time step. The model proves to strongly reduce the grid sensitivity. The physical validation was carried out by reproducing the experimental tests by Herweg and Maly [1]. Comparisons showed a good agreement between experiments and numerical results.