scholarly journals Numerical Analysis of End-Gas Autoignition and Pressure Oscillation in a Downsized SI Engine Using Large Eddy Simulation

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 3909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhong ◽  
Liu

Knock and super-knock are abnormal combustion phenomena in engines, however, they are hard to study comprehensively through optical experimental methods due to their inherent destructive nature. In present work, the methodology of large eddy simulation (LES) coupled with G equations and a detailed mechanism of primary reference fuel (PRF) combustion is utilized to address the mechanisms of knock and super-knock phenomena in a downsized spark ignition gasoline engine. The knock and super-knock with pressure oscillation are qualitatively duplicated through present numerical models. As a result, the combustion and onset of autoignition is more likely to occur at top dead center (TDC), which causes end gas at a higher temperature and pressure. It is reasonable to conclude that the intensity of knock is not only proportional to the mass fraction of mixtures burned by the autoignition flame but the thermodynamics of the unburned end-gas mixture, and the effect of thermodynamics is more important. It also turns out that two auto-ignitions occur in conventional knock conditions, while only one auto-ignition takes place in super-knock conditions. However, the single autoignition couples with the pressure wave and they reinforce each other, which eventually evolves into detonation combustion. This work gives the valuable insights into knock phenomena in spark ignition gasoline engines.

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 5039
Author(s):  
Lei Zhou ◽  
Xiaojun Zhang ◽  
Lijia Zhong ◽  
Jie Yu

Knocking is a destructive and abnormal combustion phenomenon that hinders modern spark ignition (SI) engine technologies. However, the in-depth mechanism of a single-factor influence on knocking has not been well studied. Thus, the major aim of the present study is to study the effects of flame propagation velocity and turbulence intensity on end-gas auto-ignition through a large eddy simulation (LES) and a decoupling methodology in a downsized gasoline engine. The mechanisms of end-gas auto-ignition as well as strong pressure oscillation are qualitatively analyzed. It is observed that both flame propagation velocity and turbulence have a non-monotonic effect on knocking intensity. The competitive relationship between flame propagation velocity and ignition delay of the end gas is the primary reason responding to this phenomenon. A higher flame speed leads to an increase in the heat release rate in the cylinder, and consequently, quicker increases in the temperature and pressure of the unburned end-gas mixture are obtained, leading to end-gas auto-ignition. Further, the coupling of a pressure wave and an auto-ignition flame front results in super-knocking with a maximum peak of pressure of 31 MPa. Although the turbulence indirectly influences the end-gas auto-ignition by affecting the flame propagation velocity, it can accelerate the dissipation of radicals and heat in the end gas, which significantly influences knocking intensity. Moreover, it is found that the effect of turbulence is more pronounced than that of flame propagation velocity in inhibiting knocking. It can be concluded that the intensity of the pressure oscillation depends on the unburned mixture mass as well as the local thermodynamic state induced by flame propagation and turbulence, with mutual interactions. The present work is expected to provide valuable perspective for inhibiting super-knocking of an SI gasoline engine.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 3059-3066 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Richard ◽  
O. Colin ◽  
O. Vermorel ◽  
A. Benkenida ◽  
C. Angelberger ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
pp. 146808742096234
Author(s):  
Yunde Su ◽  
Derek Splitter ◽  
Seung Hyun Kim

This paper investigates the effect of laminar-to-turbulent flame transition modeling on the prediction of cycle-to-cycle variations (CCVs) in large eddy simulation (LES) of spark-ignition (SI) engines. A laminar-to-turbulent flame transition model that describes the non-equilibrium sub-filter flame speed evolution during an early stage of flame kernel growth is developed. In the present model, the flame transition is characterized by the flame kernel size at which the flame transition ends, defined here as the flame transition scale. The proposed model captures the effects that variations in a turbulent flow field have on the evolution of early-stage burning rates, through variations in the flame transition scale. The proposed flame transition model is combined with the front propagation formulation (FPF) method and a spark-ignition model to predict CCVs in a gasoline direct injection SI engine. It is found that multi-cycle LES with the proposed flame transition model reproduces experimentally-observed CCVs satisfactorily. When the transition model is not considered or when variations in the transition process are neglected, CCVs are significantly under-predicted for the case considered here. These results indicate the importance of modeling the laminar-to-turbulent flame transition and the effect of turbulence on the transition process, when predicting CCVs, under certain engine conditions. The LES results are also used to analyze sources for variations in the flame transition. It is found, for the present engine case, that the most important source is the cycle-to-cycle variation in the turbulence dissipation rate, which is used to measure the strength of turbulence in the proposed model, near a spark plug. The large-scale velocity field and the variations of the laminar flame speed due to the mixture composition and thermal stratification are also found to be important factors to contribute to the variations in the flame transition.


Author(s):  
Y. See ◽  
M. Wang ◽  
J. Bohbot ◽  
O. Colin

Abstract The Species-Based Extended Coherent Flamelet Model (SB-ECFM) was developed and previously validated for 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) modeling of a spark-ignited gasoline direct injection engine. In this work, we seek to extend the SB-ECFM model to the large eddy simulation (LES) framework and validate the model in a homogeneous charge spark-ignited engine. In the SB-ECFM, which is a recently developed improvement of the ECFM, the progress variable is defined as a function of real species instead of tracer species. This adjustment alleviates discrepancies that may arise when the numerical treatment of real species is different than that of the tracer species. Furthermore, the species-based formulation also allows for the use of second-order numeric, which can be necessary in LES cases. The transparent combustion chamber (TCC) engine is the configuration used here for validating the SB-ECFM. It has been extensively characterized with detailed experimental measurements and the data are widely available for model benchmarking. Moreover, several of the boundary conditions leading to the engine are also measured experimentally. These measurements are used in the corresponding computational setup of LES calculations with SB-ECFM. Since the engine is spark ignited, the Imposed Stretch Spark Ignition Model (ISSIM) is utilized to model this physical process. The mesh for the current study is based on a configuration that has been validated in a previous LES study of the corresponding motored setup of the TCC engine. However, this mesh was constructed without considering the additional cells needed to sufficiently resolve the flame for the fired case. Thus, it is enhanced with value-based Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) on the progress variable to better capture the flame front in the fired case. As one facet of model validation, the ensemble average of the measured cylinder pressure is compared against the LES/SB-ECFM prediction. Secondly, the predicted cycle-to-cycle variation by LES is compared with the variation measured in the experimental setup. To this end, the LES computation is required to span a sufficient number of engine cycles to provide statistical convergence to evaluate the coefficient of variation (COV) in peak cylinder pressure. Due to the higher computational cost of LES, the runtime required to compute a sufficient number of engine cycles sequentially can be intractable. The concurrent perturbation method (CPM) is deployed in this study to obtain the required number of cycles in a reasonable time frame. Lastly, previous numerical and experimental analyses of the TCC engine have shown that the flow dynamics at the time of ignition is correlated with the cycle-to-cycle variability. Hence, similar analysis is performed on the current simulation results to determine if this correlation effect is well-captured by the current modeling approach.


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