Computational Analysis of Combustion of High and Low Cetane Fuels in a Compression Ignition Engine

Abstract

Past research has shown that the combustion of low cetane fuels in compression ignition (CI) engines results in higher fuel conversion efficiencies. However, when highcetane fuels such as diesel are substituted with lowcetane fuels such as gasoline, the engine operation tends to suffer from high carbon monoxide (CO) emissions at low loads and combustion noise at high loads. In this paper, we present a computational analysis of a lightduty CI engine operating on diesel, kerosene and gasoline. These three fuels cover a range of cetane numbers (CNs) from 46 for diesel to 25 for gasoline. Similar to experiments, the model predicted higher CO emissions at low load operation with gasoline. Predictions of incylinder details were utilized to understand differences in combustion characteristics of the three fuels. The incylinder mass contours and the evolution of model predicted incylinder mixture in خ¦â€“T coordinates were then used to explain the emission trends. From the analysis, overmixing due to early single injection was identified as the reason for high CO emissions with low load gasoline low temperature combustion (LTC). Additional simulations were performed by introducing techniques like cetane enhancement, adding hot exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), and variation of the injection scheme. Their effects on low load gasoline LTC were studied. Finally, it is shown that use of a dual pulse injection scheme with hot EGR helped to reduce the CO emissions for low load gasoline LTC while maintaining low NOx emissions.