A turbulent jet ignition engine enables operation with lean mixtures, decreasing nitrogen oxide (NO_X) emissions up to 92%, while the engine efficiency can be increased compared to conventional spark-ignition engines. The geometry of the pre-chamber and engine operating parameters play the most important role in the performance of turbulent jet ignition engines and, therefore, must be optimized. The initial experimental and 3D CFD results of a single-cylinder engine fueled by gasoline were used for the calibration of a 0D/1D simulation model. The 0D/1D simulation model was upgraded to capture the effects of multiple flame propagations, and the evolution of the turbulence level was described by the new K-k-ε turbulence model, which considers the strong turbulent jets occurring in the main chamber. The optimization of the pre-chamber volume, the orifice diameter, the injected fuel mass in the pre-chamber and the spark timing was made over 9 different operating points covering the variation in engine speed and load with the objective of minimizing the fuel consumption while avoiding knock. Two optimization methods using 0D/1D simulations were presented: an individual optimization method for each operating point and a simultaneous optimization method over 9 operating points. It was found that the optimal pre-chamber volume at each operating point was around 5% of the clearance volume, while the favorable orifice diameters depended on engine load, with optimal values around 2.5 mm and 1.2 mm at stoichiometric mixtures and lean mixtures, respectively. Simultaneous optimization of the pre-chamber geometry for all considered operating points resulted in a pre-chamber volume equal to 5.14% of the clearance volume and an orifice diameter of 1.1 mm.

This paper presents a newly developed quasi-dimensional multi-zone dual fuel combustion model, which has been integrated within the commercial engine system simulation framework. Model is based on the modified Multi-Zone Combustion Model and Fractal Combustion Model. Modified Multi-Zone Combustion Model handles the part of the combustion process that is governed by the mixing-controlled combustion, while the modified Fractal Combustion Model handles the part that is governed by the flame propagation through the combustion chamber. The developed quasi-dimensional dual fuel combustion model features phenomenological description of spray processes, i.e. liquid spray break-up, fresh charge entrainment, droplet heat-up and evaporation process. In order to capture the chemical effects on the ignition delay, special ignition delay table has been made. Additionally, to capture the effect of entrained methane on the chemical reaction rate, special table that features chemical reaction time scale has also been made. The start of flame propagation is calculated through the newly developed sub-model based on knock integral calculation. The existing k-ε turbulence model has been extended to account for the effect of diesel pilot injection on the increase of in-cylinder turbulence level. Since in the conventional dual fuel combustion process multiple flames propagate through the combustion chamber, multiple flame propagation model has been developed. This model can describe arbitrary number of flames that propagate through the combustion chamber. The validation data for the developed quasi-dimensional dual fuel combustion model have been acquired on a 2.0 liter Diesel engine, which has been modified to operate in the conventional dual fuel combustion mode. The presented model has been validated at different loads and diesel substitution ratios, and there is a good fit between the measured and cycle-simulation data.

This paper presented an experimental and numerical study of pre-chamber volume, number of orifices and orifice diameter influence on engine performance and emissions. All the measurements were performed on a single cylinder test engine at fixed engine speed of 1600 rpm, while engine load was varied by a change of the excess air ratio in the main chamber from a stochiometric mixture to a lean limit. The total of nine pre-chamber variants comprised three different pre-chamber volumes, two orifice number combinations (six and four orifices) and nine different orifice diameters. It was observed that the pre-chamber volume affects the indicated efficiency in a trend which is mostly independent of excess air ratio, with the efficiency gain between the best and worst results ranging from 1 to 4.4%. While keeping the same pre-chamber volume and the total cross-sectional area of the orifices, the larger number of orifices show better performance on two out of three investigated pre-chamber volumes, with the efficiency gains more pronounced at higher excess air ratios. Finally, on a fixed pre-chamber volume and number of orifices, the variation of orifice diameter leads to a trend in efficiency gains which favor larger orifice diameter. The comparison of the obtained efficiencies between all pre-chamber variants identified two pre-chambers, differing in each of the varied geometrical parameters, that show the best performance depending on excess air ratio range. On the other hand, a single variant which showed the worst performance on each excess ratio was identified. An additional investigation was performed by the application of the cycle-simulation model to quantify the share of emissions which are formed in the pre-chamber. The presented results showed that when PC volume is lowered, PC emission shares of NO_X and CO grow larger. The influence of orifice number and size has a minor effect on the pre-chamber emissions shares. The maximum PC emission shares of 54.8% and 80.6% are achieved at lean limit (λ = 2.2) for NO_X and CO, respectively. THC emission share, on the other hand, is not affected in a significant manner by either the pre-chamber geometry or operating conditions.

Compressed natural gas can be used in diesel engine with great benefits, but because of its low reactivity it is usually used in a so called dual fuel combustion process. Optimal parameters for dual fuel engines are not yet investigated thoroughly which is the motivation for this work. In this work, a numerical study performed in a cycle simulation tool (AVL Boost v2013) on the influence of different injection timings on fuel slip into exhaust and influence of compression ratio on knock phenomena in port injected dual fuel engine was conducted. The introduction of natural gas into the intake port of a diesel engine usually results in some fuel slipping into the exhaust port due to valve overlap. By analysing the simulation results, the injection strategy that significantly decreases the natural gas slip is defined. The knock occurrence study showed that the highest allowed compression ratio that will result in knock free operation of the presented engine is 18 for ambient intake condition, while for charged intake conditions the compression ratio should be lowered to 16.

The paper presents modeling of cycle-to-cycle variations (CCV) of a SI engine by using the modified cycle-simulation model. The presented research has been performed on CFR engine fueled by gasoline. Experimental in-cylinder pressure traces of 300 cycles have been processed for several operating points representing the spark sweep which captured the operating points with low and high CCV. The cycle-simulation model applied in this study uses significantly improved turbulence and combustion model that have been implemented into the cycle-simulation code. Developed k-ε turbulence model and the quasi-dimensional combustion model based on the fractal theory have been applied. New quasi-dimensional ignition model was developed and integrated into the fractal combustion model in order to simulate the early flame kernel growth including the detailed modeling of spark plug geometry, electric spark phenomenon, heat transfer, in-cylinder flow around spark plug and the flame kernel interaction with the turbulence. Introduction of specific perturbations of turbulence production constant enables the oscillations of in-cylinder turbulence and spark gap velocity from cycle-to-cycle. The obtained simulation results of operating points with different ignition timing show very good agreement with the experimental cycle-to-cycle combustion data. The statistical analysis of IMEP and normalized heat release and their comparison with the experimental data demonstrate the capability of the presented model to capture the effects of low and high CCV in combustion at different ignition timings. This study confirms the fact that the stochastic nature of in-cylinder fluid motion is the major source of CCV in combustion.

This paper presents a numerical study of swirl flow effects on the combustion and emissions in single-cylinder spark ignition engine. First, a three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was performed at two engine operating points to obtain the reference results of in-cylinder flow quantities required for the verification of a new $\mathit{K}\text{-}\mathit{k}\text{-}\epsilon$ turbulence model integrated with a cycle simulation. Then a zero-dimensional (0D) (quasi-dimensional) combustion model was used to analyze the swirl flow variations on the combustion and emissions where experimental results of 6 operating points were used to calibrate combustion and emission submodels in a cycle simulation. The coupling of the new turbulence and combustion model enabled the reconstruction of ordered in-cylinder swirl flow and the application of velocity operators on flame particles. The double swirl ratio increased the peak cylinder pressure by approximately 20%, and nitrogen oxide emissions were approximately 44% higher, while hydrocarbon (HC) emissions decreased by 44%. The twice lower swirl ratio decreased peak pressure by approximately 6%, and nitrogen oxide emissions were around 15% lower, while HC emissions were increased by 28%. If knock-limited spark advance is found for a double swirl ratio, the engine indicated that efficiency can be increased by 8.7% while HC emissions can be reduced by 20%.