scholarly journals Potential of Ceria-Zirconia-Based Materials in Carbon Soot Oxidation for Gasoline Particulate Filters

Catalysts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 768
Author(s):  
Eleonora Aneggi ◽  
Alessandro Trovarelli

ZrO2 and Ce0.8Zr0.2O2 mixed oxides were prepared and tested in the oxidation of carbon soot at different oxygen partial pressures and degrees of catalyst/soot contact to investigate their activity under typical gasoline direct injection (GDI) operating conditions. Under reductive atmospheres, generation of oxygen vacancies occurs in Ce0.8Zr0.2O2, while no reduction is observed on ZrO2. Both materials can oxidize carbon under high oxygen partial pressures; however, at low oxygen partial pressures, the presence of carbon can contribute to the reduction of the catalyst and formation of oxygen vacancies, which can then be used for soot oxidation, increasing the overall performance. This mechanism is more efficient in Ce0.8Zr0.2O2 than ZrO2, and depends heavily on the interaction and the degree of contact between soot and catalyst. Thus, the ability to form oxygen vacancies at lower temperatures is particularly helpful to oxidize soot at low oxygen partial pressures, and with higher CO2 selectivity under conditions typically found in GDI engine exhaust gases.

2020 ◽  
Vol 180 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Usama ELGHAWI ◽  
Ahmed MAYOUF ◽  
Athanasios TSOLAKIS

The study provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the C5-C11 hydrocarbon species generated in Spark Ignition – Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (SI/HCCI) gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine at range of operating conditions. The presented results and data were obtained from the combustion of winter grade commercial gasoline containing 2% w/w ethanol (C2H5OH) for the engine operated in steady-state, fully warmed-up condition. The hydrocarbon analysis in exhaust gases was executed on a Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) apparatus directly connected to the engine exhaust via heated line. The highest concentration of the total hydrocarbon emissions was obtained under low load HCCI engine operation at stoichiometric fuel-air ratio. The major hydrocarbon compounds detected in the collected samples were benzene, toluene, p-xylene, and naphthalene. Benzene originates from the incomplete combustion of toluene and other alkylbenzenes which are of considerable environmental interest. During the SI engine operation, increase of the engine speed and load resulted in the increase of benzene and the total olefinic species with simultaneous decrease in isopentane and isooctane. The same trends are seen with the engine operating under HCCI mode, but since the combustion temperature is always lower than SI mode under the same engine conditions, the oxidation of fuel paraffin in the former case was less. As a result, the total olefins and benzene levels in HCCI mode were lower than the corresponding amount observed in SI mode. Aromatic compounds (e.g., toluene), except for benzene, were produced at lower levels in the exhaust when the engine speed and load for both modes were increased.


Catalysts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 890
Author(s):  
Roberto Matarrese

The energy efficiency of Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines is leading to a continuous increase in GDI engine vehicle population. Consequently, their particulate matter (soot) emissions are also becoming a matter of concern. As required for diesel engines, to meet the limits set by regulations, catalyzed particulate filters are considered as an effective solution through which soot could be trapped and burnt out. However, in contrast to diesel application, the regeneration of gasoline particulate filters (GPF) is critical, as it occurs with almost an absence of NOx and under oxygen deficiency. Therefore, in the recent years it was of scientific interest to develop efficient soot oxidation catalysts that fit such particular gasoline operating conditions. Among them ceria- and perovskite-based formulations are emerging as the most promising materials. This overview summarizes the very recent academic contributions focusing on soot oxidation materials for GDI, in order to point out the most promising directions in this research area.


Author(s):  
Daniel Probst ◽  
Sameera Wijeyakulasuriya ◽  
Eric Pomraning ◽  
Janardhan Kodavasal ◽  
Riccardo Scarcelli ◽  
...  

High cycle-to-cycle variation (CCV) is detrimental to engine performance, as it leads to poor combustion and high noise and vibration. In this work, CCV in a gasoline engine is studied using large eddy simulation (LES). The engine chosen as the basis of this work is a single-cylinder gasoline direct injection (GDI) research engine. Two stoichiometric part-load engine operating points (6 BMEP, 2000 RPM) were evaluated: a non-dilute (0% EGR) case and a dilute (18% EGR) case. The experimental data for both operating conditions had 500 cycles. The measured CCV in IMEP was 1.40% for the non-dilute case and 7.78% for the dilute case. To estimate CCV from simulation, perturbed concurrent cycles of engine simulations were compared to consecutively obtained engine cycles. The motivation behind this is that running consecutive cycles to estimate CCV is quite time-consuming. For example, running 100 consecutive cycles requires 2–3 months (on a typical cluster), however, by running concurrently one can potentially run all 100 cycles at the same time and reduce the overall turnaround time for 100 cycles to the time taken for a single cycle (2 days). The goal of this paper is to statistically determine if concurrent cycles, with a perturbation applied to each individual cycle at the start, can be representative of consecutively obtained cycles and accurately estimate CCV. 100 cycles were run for each case to obtain statistically valid results. The concurrent cycles began at different timings before the combustion event, with the motivation to identify the closest time before spark to minimize the run time. Only a single combustion cycle was run for each concurrent case. The calculated standard deviation of peak pressure and coefficient of variance (COV) of indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) were compared between the consecutive and concurrent methods to quantify CCV. It was found that the concurrent method could be used to predict CCV with either a velocity or numerical perturbation. A large and small velocity perturbation were compared and both produced correct predictions, implying that the type of perturbation is not important to yield a valid realization. Starting the simulation too close to the combustion event, at intake valve close (IVC) or at spark timing, under-predicted the CCV. When concurrent simulations were initiated during or before the intake even, at start of injection (SOI) or earlier, distinct and valid realizations were obtained to accurately predict CCV for both operating points. By simulating CCV with concurrent cycles, the required wall clock time can be reduced from 2–3 months to 1–2 days. Additionally, the required core-hours can be reduced up to 41%, since only a portion of each cycle needs to be simulated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Ayad ◽  
Swapnil Sharma ◽  
Rohan Verma ◽  
Naeim Henein

Detection of combustion-related phenomena such as misfire, knock, and sporadic preignition is very important for the development of electronic controls needed for the gasoline direct injection engines to meet the production goals in power, fuel economy, and low emissions. This paper applies several types of combustion ionization sensors, and a pressure transducer that directly senses the in-cylinder combustion, and the knock sensor which is an accelerometer that detects the impact of combustion on engine structure vibration. Experimental investigations were conducted on a turbocharged four-cylinder gasoline direct injection engine under operating conditions that produce the above phenomena. One of the cylinders is instrumented with a piezo quartz pressure transducer, MSFI (multi-sensing fuel injector), a stand-alone ion current probe, and a spark plug applied to act as an ion current sensor. A comparison is made between the capabilities of the pressure transducer, ion current sensors, and the knock sensor in detecting the above phenomena. The signals from in-cylinder combustion sensors give more accurate information about combustion than the knock sensor. As far as the feasibility and cost of their application in production vehicles, the spark plug sensor and MSFI appear to be the most favorable, followed by the stand-alone mounted sensor which is an addition to the engine.


2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikhil Sharma ◽  
Avinash Kumar Agarwal

Abstract Fuel availability, global warming, and energy security are the three main driving forces, which determine suitability and long-term implementation potential of a renewable fuel for internal combustion engines for a variety of applications. Comprehensive engine experiments were conducted in a single-cylinder gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine prototype having a compression ratio of 10.5, for gaining insights into application of mixtures of gasoline and primary alcohols. Performance, emissions, combustion, and particulate characteristics were determined at different engine speeds (1500, 2000, 2500, 3000 rpm), different fuel injection pressures (FIP: 40, 80, 120, 160 bars) and different test fuel blends namely 15% (v/v) butanol, ethanol, and methanol blended with gasoline, respectively (Bu15, E15, and M15) and baseline gasoline at a fixed (optimum) spark timing of 24 deg before top dead center (bTDC). For a majority of operating conditions, gasohols exhibited superior characteristics except minor engine performance penalty. Gasohols therefore emerged as serious candidate as a transitional renewable fuel for utilization in the existing GDI engines, without requirement of any major hardware changes.


Nanomaterials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torregrosa-Rivero ◽  
Moreno-Marcos ◽  
Albaladejo-Fuentes ◽  
Sánchez-Adsuar ◽  
Illán-Gómez

BaFe1-xCuxO3 perovskites (x = 0, 0.1, 0.3 and 0.4) have been synthetized, characterized and tested for soot oxidation in both Diesel and Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) exhaust conditions. The catalysts have been characterized by BET, ICP-OES, SEM-EDX, XRD, XPS, H2-TPR and O2-TPD and the results indicate the incorporation of copper in the perovskite lattice which leads to: i) the deformation of the initial hexagonal perovskite structure for the catalyst with the lowest copper content (BFC1), ii) the modification to cubic from hexagonal structure for the high copper content catalysts (BFC3 and BFC4), iii) the creation of a minority segregated phase, BaOx-CuOx, in the highest copper content catalyst (BFC4), iv) the rise in the quantity of oxygen vacancies/defects for the catalysts BFC3 and BFC4, and v) the reduction in the amount of O2 released in the course of the O2-TPD tests as the copper content increases. The BaFe1-xCuxO3 perovskites catalyze both the NO2-assisted diesel soot oxidation (500 ppm NO, 5% O2) and, to a lesser extent, the soot oxidation under fuel cuts GDI operation conditions (1% O2). BFC0 is the most active catalysts as the activity seems to be mainly related with the amount of O2 evolved during an. O2-TPD, which decreases with copper content.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (19) ◽  
pp. 4133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang ◽  
Zhang ◽  
Wang ◽  
Han ◽  
Chen

Engine knock has become the prime barrier to significantly improve power density and efficiency of the engines. To further look into the essence of the abnormal combustion, this work studies the working processes of normal combustion and knock combustion under practical engine operating conditions using a three-dimensional computation fluid dynamics (CFD) fluid software CONVERGE (Version 2.3.0, Convergent Science, Inc., Madison, USA). The results show that the tumble in the cylinder is gradually formed with the increase of the valve lift, enhances in the compression stroke and finally is broken due to the extrusion of the piston. The fuel droplets gradually evaporate and move to the intake side under the turbulent and high temperature in the cylinder. During the normal combustion process, the flame propagates faster on the intake side and it facilitates mixture in cylinder combustion. During the knock combustion simulation, the hotspots near the exhaust valve are observed, and the propagating detonation wave caused by multiple hotspots auto-ignition indicates significant effects on knock intensity of in-cylinder pressure.


2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaushik Saha ◽  
Sibendu Som ◽  
Michele Battistoni ◽  
Yanheng Li ◽  
Shaoping Quan ◽  
...  

A numerical study of two-phase flow inside the nozzle holes and the issuing spray jets for a multihole direct injection gasoline injector has been presented in this work. The injector geometry is representative of the Spray G nozzle, an eight-hole counterbore injector, from the engine combustion network (ECN). Simulations have been carried out for a fixed needle lift. The effects of turbulence, compressibility, and noncondensable gases have been considered in this work. Standard k–ε turbulence model has been used to model the turbulence. Homogeneous relaxation model (HRM) coupled with volume of fluid (VOF) approach has been utilized to capture the phase-change phenomena inside and outside the injector nozzle. Three different boundary conditions for the outlet domain have been imposed to examine nonflashing and evaporative, nonflashing and nonevaporative, and flashing conditions. Noticeable hole-to-hole variations have been observed in terms of mass flow rates for all the holes under all the operating conditions considered in this study. Inside the nozzle holes mild cavitationlike and in the near-nozzle region flash-boiling phenomena have been predicted when liquid fuel is subjected to superheated ambiance. Under favorable conditions, considerable flashing has been observed in the near-nozzle regions. An enormous volume is occupied by the gasoline vapor, formed by the flash boiling of superheated liquid fuel. Large outlet domain connecting the exits of the holes and the pressure outlet boundary appeared to be necessary leading to substantial computational cost. Volume-averaging instead of mass-averaging is observed to be more effective, especially for finer mesh resolutions.


Author(s):  
Daniel Probst ◽  
Sameera Wijeyakulasuriya ◽  
Pinaki Pal ◽  
Christopher Kolodziej ◽  
Eric Pomraning

Abstract Knock is a major design challenge for spark-ignited engines. Knock constrains high load operation and limits efficiency gains that can be achieved by implementing higher compression ratios. The propensity to knock depends on the interaction among fuel properties, engine geometry, and operating conditions. Moreover, cycle-to-cycle variability (CCV) in knock intensity is commonly encountered under abnormal combustion conditions. In this situation, knock needs to be assessed with multiple engine cycles. Therefore, when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict knock behavior, multi-cycle simulations must be performed. The wall clock time for simulating multiple consecutive engine cycles is prohibitive, especially for a statistically valid sample size (i.e. 30–100 cycles). In this work, 3-d CFD simulations were used to model knocking phenomena in the cooperative fuel research (CFR) engine. Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (uRANS) simulations were performed with a hybrid combustion modeling approach using the G-equation method to track the turbulent flame front and finite-rate chemistry model to predict end-gas autoignition. To circumvent the high cost of running simulations with a large number of consecutive engine cycles, a concurrent perturbation method (CPM) was evaluated to predict knock CCV. The CPM was based on previous work by the authors, in which concurrent engine cycles were used to predict engine CCV in a non-knocking gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine. Concurrent cycles were initialized by perturbing a saved flow field with a random isotropic velocity field. By initializing each cycle with a perturbation sufficiently early in the cycle, each case yields a distinct and valid prediction of combustion due to the chaotic nature of the system. Three operating points were simulated, with different spark timings corresponding to heavy knock, light knock, and no knock. For all the operating points, other conditions were based on the standard research octane number (RON) test specification for iso-octane. The spark timing of the heavy knock case was the same as that of the RON test. The in-cylinder pressure fluctuations were isolated using a frequency filtering method. A bandpass filter was applied to eliminate high and low frequencies. The knocking pressures were calculated consistently between the experimental and simulation data, including the sampling frequency of the data. The simulation data was sampled to match the sampling rate of the experimental data. The knock intensities were compared for the concurrently obtained cycles, the consecutively obtained cycles, and experimental cycles. Knock predictions from the concurrent and consecutive simulations compared well to each other and with experiments, thereby demonstrating the validity of the CPM approach.


Author(s):  
Brandon A. Sforzo ◽  
Aniket Tekawade ◽  
Alan L. Kastengren ◽  
Kamel Fezzaa ◽  
Jan Ilavsky ◽  
...  

Abstract The effects of fuel blend properties on spray and injector performance has been investigated for several operating conditions in a side-mount injector for Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) using two certification fuel blends, Euro 5 and Euro 6. Several X-ray diagnostic techniques were conducted to characterize the injector and spray morphology. Detailed internal geometry of the GDI injector was measured with a feature-resolution of 1.8 micrometers, through the use of hard X-ray tomography. The geometry characterization of this six-hole GDI, side mount injector, quantifies relevant hole and counterbore dimensions and reveals the intricate details within the flow passages, including surface roughness and micron-sized features. Internal valve motion was measured with a temporal resolution of 20 microseconds and a spatial resolution of 2.0 micrometers, for three injection pressures and several injector energizing strategies. The needle motion for both fuels exhibit similar lift profiles for common energizing commands. A combination of X-ray radiography and Ultra-Small-Angle X-ray Scattering (USAXS) was used to characterize the fuel mass distribution and the droplet sizing, respectively. Tomographic spray radiography revealed the near-nozzle distribution of fuel mass for each of the fuels, and the asymmetry produced by the angled nozzles. Under evaporative conditions, the two fuels show minor differences in peak fuel mass distribution during steady injection, though both exhibit fluctuations in injection during the early, transient phase. US-AXS measurements of the path-specific surface area of the spray indicated lower peak values for the more evaporative conditions in the near nozzle region. These spray measurements portray the specific behavior of real fuel blends under a variety of conditions, illustrating the need to examine multi-component fuels to better understand relevant cases. Furthermore, this work furnishes the realistic boundary values for simulations to appropriately predict the sprays which were experimentally measured, and influenced by those realistic conditions.


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