A Numerical Investigation on Mixing Characteristics of Natural Gas Jets With High-Pressure Injection

With increasingly stringent emissions limitation of greenhouse gas and atmospheric pollutants for ship, the direct injection of natural gas on the cylinder head with high-pressure injection is an effective method to make a high power output and decrease harmful gas emissions in marine natural gas dual fuel engines. However, the effects on mixing characteristics of high-pressure natural gas underexpanded jet have not been fully understood. Especially, the injection pressure is up to 30 MPa with large injection quantity and critical surrounding gas conditions for the low-speed two-stroke marine engine. Therefore, this research is focused on the flow and mixing process of the natural gas jet with high-pressure injection under the in-cylinder conditions of low-speed two-stroke marine engine. The gas jet penetration, the distribution of velocity and density, the equivalence ratio and air entrainment have been analyzed under different nozzle hole diameters by numerical simulation. The effects of surrounding gas conditions including pressure, temperature and swirl ratio on air entrainment and equivalence ratio distribution were studied in detail. From the numerical simulation, it is found that the mixing characteristics of natural gas jet can be improved under in-cylinder conditions of higher ambient temperature and swirl ratio, which is relevant to the low-speed two-stroke marine engine.