2017 4 4 1 Maher
2017 4 4 1 Maher
2017 4 4 1 Maher
By Mohamed Maher
Ahmed Abu-Elhamyel†
Omar Hassan‡
Alaa El-Din Ramadan
Aya Diab
Mostafa Abdelkhalek
Adham Mohamed
Mohamed Abdel-Hay
Growing concern regarding energy resources and the environment has increased
interest in developing Diesel engines for better fuel economy and lower emissions. A
three dimensional CFD simulation of a 4-stroke engine is developed for a Ruggerini
RD 270 engine using internal combustion engine module in ANSYS-FLUENT. A cold
flow simulation is performed first to visualize the air motion inside the cylinder and to
detect the changes of air properties through the different strokes of the engine. This
simulation is validated against a compression test performed on the engine at the
“Green Energy Lab” at Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University. To test the spray
formation model before applying it in the engine model, a simulation of Diesel spray
in a constant volume chamber is performed and validated against the experimental
data by Park et al. (2010). Integration of engine model and spray model is then
performed. A comparison of variation of penetration length for different injection
pressures and diameters is made.
Introduction
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
†
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
‡
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Ain Shams University, Egypt
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Ain Shams University, Egypt.
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Engine Model
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where is the piston location (0 at the top dead center (TDC) and at the
bottom dead center (BDC)), is the connecting rod length, is the piston stroke,
and is the current crank angle. The current crank angle is calculated from
where is the starting crank angle and is the crank shaft speed (ANSYS).
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Piston lift
(m)
Position (CA°)
__ exhaust
__ intake
Valve lift
(m)
Position (CA°)
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where is the density of the air, and are the velocity components of axes
and respectively and is the source term due to mass exchange
between the air and fuel droplets (evaporation) after the injection.
The momentum equation for axis is given by
where is the void fraction of the air, is the air internal energy, is the
flow velocity is the rate of volumetric heat addition per unit mass, is the
effective thermal conductivity, and is the energy coupling term with
the dispersed phase.
To model the air turbulence inside the chamber, the standard - model was
used. The transport equations of this model are given by
and
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where is the turbulent kinetic energy, is the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation
rate, is the turbulent viscosity, is the turbulent Prandtl number, is the
turbulent Mach number and , , , and are constants (ANSYS;
Crowe et al., 1998).
The spatial discretization of the governing equations is set to second order
upwind scheme for higher accuracy. The temporal discretization is done by
setting the solution time step to be equal to the time of 0.25 degree crank angle.
At a speed of 3000 rpm, this time step is nearly equal to 1.39 × 10-5 second
which is small enough to appropriately resolve variations during the engine
simulation.
The velocity contours of the chamber for the cold flow simulation at various
crank angles were obtained as shown in Figure 8.
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The maximum air velocity at the intake stroke or exhaust stroke well exceeds
100 m/s, which implies that high turbulence levels are achieved inside the
chamber. It is also obvious that the piston configuration enhances the air
turbulence which leads to the formation of a vortex inside the chamber as found by
the tumble ratio graph detected from the simulation shown in Figure 9 (Sushma
and Jagadeesha, 2013).
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It is worth noting that the calculation was run for 3 engine cycles (3×4
strokes) passing through the initial transients to achieve periodicity of the solution.
To validate the data obtained from the simulation, the pressure variation
predicted by the model shown in Figure 10 reached a maximum of 23.5 bar which
deviates by only 6.8 % from that measured during the compression test (22 bar)
(Amr et al., 2016). This deviation may be attributed to leakage which is hard to
simulate in the model given the small clearance gap which would have required
finer mesh that could lead to a significant increase in the computational time for
minor improvement.
Spray Model
In any engine, the fuel atomization and spray formation facilitate liquid
dispersion in a gaseous phase significantly increasing the interface between the
two fluids which is favorable for mass and heat transfer. In Diesel engines the
combustion process basically depends on the spray structure of the fuel and its
interaction with the air within the combustion chamber.
For validation purposes, a simplified model of the spray injected in a constant
volume chamber is developed and its predictions for comparison against
experimental data published in the open literature (Nawi et al., 2015; Wang et al.,
2016; Fattah et al., 2015; Turner et al., 2012). Specifically, experimental data by
Park et al. (2010) was used for validation since the test conditions were quite close
to those of the current engine conditions with a pressure of 20 bars at the end of
the compression stroke as listed in Table 2.
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Diesel fuel of 830 kg/m3 density was injected from a six-hole injector with
a hole diameter of 0.126 mm and length of 0.8 mm. The simulation in the current
work was done for only one hole given its injection flow rate profile shown in
Figure 11.
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mass exchanges. This coupling is achieved via mass, momentum and energy
source terms. The mass source term is given by
where is the rate of mass transfer (evaporation) from particle into the
volume of interest , is Sherwood number, is the particle diameter, is
the average density between liquid density at the droplet surface and the
freestream density, is the diffusion coefficient and and are the
mass fraction of species A at the droplet surface and in the free stream
respectively.
The momentum source term along axis is given by
where is the particle velocity in direction. The first term represents the
momentum flux via mass transfer and the second term represents the dynamic
forces on the particle. Again the momentum source terms of and axes are
similar to that of axis.
The energy source term is given by
where is the heat transfer rate to the particle, is the emissivity, is the
Stephan-Boltzmann constant, is Nusselt number, is the particle temperature
and is the continuous phase temperature (ANSYS).
The initial high momentum of the spray into a chamber of high pressure leads
to the breakup of the droplets by higher drag forces mainly. Kelvin-Helmholtz
Rayleigh-Taylor (KH-RT) model is recommended for spray formation modeling
since simulates the spray breakup effectively (Afshar, 2014; Chryssakis and
Kaiktsis, 2008; Reitz and Beale, 1999). This model combines the effects of
Kelvin-Helmholtz waves driven by aerodynamic forces with Rayleigh-Taylor
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1 ms
2 ms
3 ms
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Figure 16. Penetration Length Curves for Real Spray and Modeled Spray
Now that the engine model has been validated against experimental data, it
was interesting to explore how the model predicts the spray behavior under
different operating and/or design conditions. It is important to note here that the
injection in current engine is mechanical with lower injection pressures than
that used in the validation process but it is assumed that the breakup and atomizer
models hold for the pressure range under investigation.
The average injection mass flow rate can be determined by the following
equation:
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where is the average injection mass flow rate per hole per cylinder pet cycle,
is the flow coefficient through the orifice, is the orifice cross sectional
area, is the fuel density and is the pressure difference between the injection
pressure and the chamber pressure.
The predicted spray penetration length under these conditions, referred to
as Case 1, is shown in Figure 17. It should be noted that angle zero is taken at
the start of the injection process.
Cases 1, 2, and 3 are compared in Figure 18, clearly increasing the injection
pressure imparts more momentum to the spray and hence increases its penetration
length.
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Now the effect of changing injector hole diameter while keeping the injection
pressure, injection period as well as the nozzle's length-to-diameter ratio constant
is investigated. The model predictions under these two conditions (Cases 4 and 5)
are given in Table 5.
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The previous cases focused on the impact of injection pressures and diameters
on the spray behavior without taking into consideration the stoichiometric
condition inside the combustion chamber. Usually, Diesel engines operate air-
to-fuel ratios of about 15:1, i.e. with lean and definitely not rich or stoichiometric
mixtures at all load conditions. This is necessary to ensure proper mixing between
the fuel vapor and the air before the end of combustion. The stoichiometric
reaction for the combustion of Diesel fuel with air is represented by
The air-to-fuel ( ) ratio in the previous reaction equals 14.98. Air mass
in the chamber before the injection was calculated in the simulation and found
to be 0.000697 kg. The injection period for all the cases in the simulation was
20° crank angle with the engine running at 3000 rpm so the injected fuel mass
through the 4 holes of the injector for each case could be calculated. Table 6
shows the ratios for all the cases and the excess air factor for each one
which is defined as the ratio between the actual ratio to the stoichiometric one.
Table 6. Air-to-fuel Ratio and Excess Air Factor for Cases 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
Case
1 17.95 1.198
2 14.85 0.991
3 12.95 0.864
4 11.47 0.766
5 8.78 0.586
It seems that the mixtures of Cases 2, 3, 4 and 5 are all rich and hence
unrealistic since it will be difficult to burn all of the fuel particles thus leading
to soot formation. Therefore, another simulation was performed to study the
spray behavior if the injection pressures and diameters were changed while
keeping the fuel mass flow rate constant and hence a constant ratio. In this
study the injection pressures used ranged from 350 bar to 1200 bar like those
used in modern common rail injection systems. The injection mass flow rate
was kept at 0.008738 kg/s like Case 1. Table 7 shows the data of the new three
cases.
The resultant penetration curves for these cases are shown in Figure 20.
Initially, particles issuing from larger holes will penetrate further than those
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issuing from their smaller counterparts since the momentum of the former is
much higher due to their larger mass. However, this behavior doesn‟t last too
long as the effect of higher injection velocity due to the higher pressure difference
dominates as such the fuel particles reach the walls of the chamber before those
injected with lower pressures.
Conclusions
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since fuel particles may reach the engine walls before they fully evaporate,
which implies the need for optimization.
Future Work
Acknowledgments
This research was made possible by the financial support of Ain Shams
University 2014/2015 Research Grant. The authors wish to express their deep
gratitude.
Nomenclature
Piston location
TDC Top dead center
BDC Bottom dead center
Connecting rod length
Piston stroke
Current crank angle
Starting crank angle
Crank shaft speed
Time
Density of the air
Velocity components of axis
Velocity components of axis
Velocity components of axis
Pressure
Flow velocity
Normal stress in direction
Shear stresses parallel to and normal to
Shear stresses parallel to and normal to
Void fraction of the air
Air internal energy
Rate of volumetric heat addition per unit mass
Effective thermal conductivity
Mass source term
Momentum source term
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References
Afshar, A. (2014) „Evaluation of liquid fuel spray models for hybrid RANS/LES and
DLES prediction of turbulent reactive flows‟, Graduate Department of Aerospace
Engineering, University of Toronto.
Amr E., Omar E., Amr K. and Hazem S. (2016) „Design and construction of variable
compression ratio modification on a 4-stroke double cylinder diesel engine‟,
Graduation Project Report, Mechanical Power Department, Ain Shams University.
ANSYS® Academic Research, Release 16, Help System, FLUENT theory guide,
ANSYS, Inc.
Chryssakis, C. and Kaiktsis, L. (2008) „Evaluation of Fuel Spray Atomization Models
for Conditions Applicable to Large Marine Diesel Engines‟, in ILASS.
Crowe, C. T., Sommerfeld, M. and Tsuji, Y. (1998) Multiphase Flows with Droplets and
Particles, CRC Press New York. doi: 10.1201/b11103-4.
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