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Numerical Experiment of CI Engine Combustion

Using CONVERGE Software

Conference Paper · March 2014

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 Numerical Experiment of CI Engine Combustion Using CONVERGE
Software
Vipin Dhyani1, Deepak Kumar2, Prabhakar3, V. R. K. Raju4, S. S. Rao5
1
vipdhyani@gmail.com 2 brt.deepak@gmail.com 3ganjiprabhakar@gmail.com
4
vrkraju@nitw.ac.in 5 sneni@nitw.ac.in
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, Andhra
Pradesh, 506 004

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been growing requirement to develop more efficient
engines and minimizing engine emissions in a shorter timescale. This is
mainly due to increasing demand for fuel economy and tightening legislation
for emissions. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), as a rapid and cost
effective tool, is being increasingly used in different stages of engine design
and optimization. Internal-Combustion (IC) engine performance and emission
characteristics are strongly determined by the complex interacting processes of
in-cylinder flow, fuel spray injection and combustion. The combustion system
plays an important role in engine performance, emission and is therefore
attracting great attention in CFD simulations.
The complexity involved in IC engine combustion related to
interaction of flow, turbulence and spray imposes a greater challenge in
simulating combustion using CFD, whereas using CONVERGE software,
these above issues can be tackled rapidly and accurately. CONVERGE utilizes
the SAGE detailed chemistry solver for modeling the ignition and combustion
processes. The present work considers the simulation of a CI engine with the
help of a CFD package, CONVERGE. Numerical simulation has been carried
out to determine the effect of injection timing on the performance and
emissions of a CI engine.
Keywords: CI Engine, CONVERGE Software, Injection timing, Combustion
Modeling, Emissions.

1. Introduction

The IC engines are one of the key drivers in modern industrial society. The increased
transportation facility is the reason behind the higher living standard of today. There are two
types of IC engines, based on method of ignition viz. spark ignition (SI) engines and
compression ignition (CI) engines. The conventional SI combustion is characterized by a
flame propagation process. The combustion in SI engines can be controlled by varying
ignition timing from the spark discharge. Since, the mixture is premixed and typically
stoichiometric, the emissions of soot are orders of magnitude lower than that of in the diesel
engines. In a fixed air/fuel ratio, the load controlling is possible only by controlling the air
mass flow into the combustion chamber. The throttle used for this purpose gives rise to
pumping losses and reduction in efficiency. As a result, the major disadvantage of SI engines
is its low efficiency at partial loads. The compression ratio in SI engines is limited by knock
and can normally be limited in the range from 8 to 12 contributing to the lower efficiency.
Conventional diesel combustion, as a typical representation of CI combustion, operates at
higher compression ratios (12–24) than SI engines. In this type of engine, the air–fuel mixture
auto-ignites as a result of piston compression instead of ignition by a spark plug. The
processes which occur between the two moments when the liquid fuel leaves the injector
nozzles and when the fuel starts to burn are complex and include droplet formation,
collisions, breakup and evaporation. The rate of combustion is effectively limited by these
processes. A part of the air and fuel will be premixed and burn fast, but for the larger fraction
of the fuel, the time requirement for evaporation, diffusion, etc. is not enough. Therefore, the
mixture can be divided into high fuel concentration regions and high temperature flame
regions. In the high fuel concentration regions, a large amount of soot is formed because of
the absence of oxygen (O2). Some soot can be oxidized with the increase of in-cylinder
temperature. The in-cylinder temperature in a conventional diesel engine is about 2700 K,
which leads to a great amount of NOx formation. For diesel engines, a trade-off between
these two emissions is observed, and their problem is how to break-through the compromise
between NOx and particulate matter (PM) emissions. After-treatment to reduce NOx and
particulates is expensive. Consequently, the obvious ideal combination would be to find an
engine type with high efficiency of diesel engines and very low emissions of gasoline engines
with catalytic converters. One such candidate is the process known as homogeneous charge
compression ignition (HCCI).

HCCI, an alternate combustion concept, has proven to be capable of reducing both NOx and
smoke emissions significantly. A major advantage of HCCI is that, it shows potential to meet
stringent future emission regulations without the need for NOx and soot after treatment
systems. In HCCI, a homogeneous air-fuel mixture is compressed and self-ignited. Due to the
fact that the mixture is homogeneous and lean, there are no soot-producing fuel rich zones.
The degree to which NOx and smoke production is eliminated depends partly on the actual
homogeneity of the mixture. The HCCI engine is an alternative to the conventional diesel
engine. In fact, HCCI could be regarded as a type of operating mode rather than a type of
engine. The main objective of HCCI combustion is to reduce NOx and smoke emissions. In
gasoline engines, a near stoichiometric mixture is burned with a relatively high temperature
flame front where NOx is formed. On the other hand, the inhomogeneity of diesel
combustion results in high smoke from fuel-rich regions and high NOx from high
temperature regions. The HCCI engine is usually operated at part load under which the lean
homogeneous mixture auto-ignites at multiple locations in the cylinder. The mixture is lean
so that less NOx is formed [1]. Meanwhile, the mixture is homogeneous so that less smoke
formation is observed. The lean homogeneous mixture burns at relatively low temperature
which results in low heat loss and hence high fuel efficiency can be achieved. In addition, no
throttling (as in gasoline engine) or high-pressure fuel injection system (as in diesel engines)
is needed, which also results in better efficiency and low cost. Since the start of combustion is
determined by the in-cylinder conditions, there is no direct control of the combustion
phasing. The in-cylinder conditions can be altered by varying the compression ratio, intake
air temperature and EGR rate. However, there are still challenges associated with the
successful operation of HCCI engines. One of the difficulties is to control the combustion
phasing mainly the assurance of autoignition appropriate timings over a wide range of
operating conditions. Another obstacle of HCCI engine operation is the relatively high
emissions of unburned hydrocarbon (HC) and carbon monoxide (CO) due to low in-cylinder
temperature caused by lean-burn (incomplete combustion) or high-dilution combustion. The
power output of the HCCI engine is also limited since the combustion can become unstable
and knock-like cylinder pressure oscillations occur as the mixture approaches stoichiometric.
Other challenges include the preparation of the homogeneous mixture, utilization of exhaust
gas recirculation (EGR), optimization under transient operations and weak cold-start
capability.

Apart from these challenges, for accomplishing cleaner and more efficient engine operating
mode such as HCCI, detail information is needed on the processes which take place in an IC
engine. Performing experiments on an engine is difficult because of the complexity involved
in changing different parameters. Numerical experiments (simulation) have the advantage
over an expensive and time consuming measurement set-up. Because of the increasing power
of computers, the processes in an internal combustion engine such as turbulence, spray
injection, combustion etc can be modeled in more detail. CONVERGE, KIVA, STAR-CD,
FLUENT, FORTE, VECTIS are some of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) packages
used for IC engine modeling and simulation.

CONVERGE is a revolutionary computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program that eliminates

the time required for grid generation from the simulation process. Unlike many other CFD
programs, CONVERGE automatically generates a perfectly orthogonal, structured grid at
runtime, based on simple, user-defined grid control parameters. This runtime grid generation
method completely eliminates the need to manually generate a grid.

In addition to its novel approach to grid generation and boundary treatment, CONVERGE
includes state-of-the-art numerical techniques and models for turbulence, spray, combustion,
conjugate heat transfer, and cavitation. These sub-models have been extensively validated for
different cases of internal combustion engine. While CONVERGE is capable of modeling
many flow problems, it has been designed with different sub-models, which have capabilities
to model engines. Unlike other CFD solvers that approach engine modeling as an
afterthought or as an add-on to an already existing solver, CONVERGE was designed from
its inception to be the premier CFD solver for modeling internal combustion engines. The
simplicity of grid generation for moving boundaries, adaptive mesh refinement, increased
numerical accuracy, and state-of-the-art sub-models are evidence of this objective.

For achieving HCCI combustion mode, a number of parameters have to be changed such as
injection timing, compression ratio, injection pressure, number of injector orifice etc., Present
work considers the effect of injection timing on the performance and emissions of CI engine.
Manimaran R. et al. [2] studied the effect of early injection on PCCI engine they performed
experiments with various injection timings from 60 bTDC to 300 bTDC. From the studies, it
was found that oxides of nitrogen increases and soot decreases as injection is advanced.
Although the low ignition resistance of diesel fuel makes the combustion phasing and rate
more difficult to control, it has the advantage that part load HCCI operation can be combined
with conventional diesel operation at higher loads. The fuel can be injected in the intake
system or directly into the cylinder during the compression stroke. A combination of early
injection and injection around TDC is reported to reduce NOx and soot emissions. Su et al [3]
conducted experiments on a single cylinder diesel engine running in HCCI mode using diesel.
A common rail fuel injection system was used to control the fuel injection pressure, injected
quantity and injection timings. The engine was equipped with a five hole nozzle injector with
injection angle of 1000. For single injection cases with different injection timings namely 60,
70 and 800 bTDC have been studied .It is noticed from the results that increase in HC and CO
emissions. Sibendu S. et al [4], studied the effect of nozzle orifice geometry on spray,
combustion, and emission characteristics under diesel engine conditions using CONVERGE
software and found that the amount of soot produced is the highest for the conical nozzle,
while the amount of NOx produced is the highest for the hydroground nozzle.
2. Numerical experiment

CONVERGE, a CFD software specially developed for in-cylinder simulations, is used here in
the present study to simulate the in cylinder processes in a direct injection diesel engine. It
uses a Cartesian coordinate system and a finite volume-based implicit discretization
procedure.

In the present work an attempt has been made to study the effect of early injection on the
performance and emission of DICI engine. The dimensions and other specifications are given
in the table 1 below.

2.1 Engine and Injector Specifications and operating conditions:

Table 1 Engine specifications and operating conditions

Engine Specification
Cylinder bore (m) 0.13716
Cylinder stroke (m) 0.1651
connecting rod length (m) 0.263
Initial swirl ratio 0.978
Nozzle diameter (m) 0.000259
Spray cone angle (degree) 9
Operating conditions
Speed (rpm) 1600.0
Intake Temperature (K) 355
Intake Pressure (bar) 1.97
Start of injection (degree) -9.0
Duration of injection (degree) 21.0

2.2 Engine Modelling and simulation using CONVERGE

For the present analysis, cylinder under consideration has the fuel injector of six holes,
because of this symmetry, a sector model has been considered with 60 degree sector angle.
The CAD model for the sector has been created using Pro E software. The sector model in
CONVERGE window is shown below. The following sequence of operations has been
carried out:

1. An axis symmetric CAD model with 60 degree sector angle signifies that 6 hole nozzle has
been used for the present analysis. Initially the CAD model is saved in stl file format and then
it is imported in CONVERGE Studio. Geometry has been cleaned and exported as
“surface.dat” file. The front and side views of the suface.dat file is shown below:
 Fig 2.1 Front view (left) and side view (right) of engine sector model

2. Then in case set-up step, a set of initial and boundary conditions have been assigned to the
geometry using input files, which are written in ASCII format. Some of the essential inputs
are given in table 2.
Table 2 Some essential input files

Combustion models
Turbulence models
Boundary condition information for each boundary zone specified in
the preprocessor.
Engine specific parameters
Main driver specifying various quantities including: simulation start
time, end time, output frequency, physical model activation, solver
settings and base grid size
Initial conditions
Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), which enhances mesh resolution
based upon gradients.

3. After assigning all these input and boundary conditions, these files were exported to a
specified folder and runs has been taken using CONVERGE solver.
4. Simulation runs has been taken for rated condition with injection timing of 90 bTDC and
another simulation has been taken by varying the injection timing to 200 bTDC. The results of
simulation are discussed in the subsequent section in detail.

3. Results and discussions

Present numerical results have been taken to study the effect of early injection on DICI
engine, in which injection timing is varied from 90 bTDC to 200 bTDC.

3.1 Pressure variation

As injection starts at 200 bTDC instead of 90 bTDC, the initial air temperature and pressure
are lower, the ignition delay would increase, so more time is available for mixture formation
and thus efficient combustion takes place. Therefore, maximum or peak pressure increases
from 115 bar to 145 bar. Since the pressure is directly proportional to the power output, the
power output of the engine is also increased.

Fig 3.1 Variation of Pressure Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200 bTDC
(right)

3.2 Temperature variation

As an effect of early injection, the peak temperature value increases from 1750K to 2250K
and shifts toward TDC. As a consequence of early injection, delay period increases and more
combustion takes place during premixed phase, resulting in higher values of peak
temperature.
Fig 3.2 Variation of Temperature Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200bTDC
(right)

3.3 Heat release rate

As the injection advances, an instantaneous heat release takes place because of instantaneous
combustion of premixed charge, which shifts maximum heat release (HR) rate 50bTDC.

Fig 3.3 Variation of Heat Release rate Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC(left) and SOI
200bTDC(right)
3.4 Turbulence Kinetic Energy

Turbulent kinetic energy signifies the intensity of turbulence created by charge motion. As
the injection advances, turbulent kinetic energy is increased due to instantaneous heat release
and compression of hot gases.

Fig 3.4 Variation of Turbulent kinetic energy Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC(left) and
SOI 200bTDC(right)
3.5 Spray penetration

The distance from the nozzle exit that encompasses 98% of the total liquid mass is defined as
the spray penetration. Spray penetration depends upon difference of injection pressure and in-
cylinder pressure. Spray penetration climbs up to higher value because the in-cylinder
pressure at those crank angles is lesser as an effect of early injection.

Fig 3.5 Variation of spray penetration length Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI
200 bTDC (right)
3.6 Soot

Soot formation and soot oxidation curves are shown in the figures below, most of the soot
formed gets oxidized during expansion stroke and the maximum value of remaining soot is
decreased by 68%, as a result of injection advancing.

Fig 3.6 Variation of Soot Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200 bTDC (right)

3.7 HC emission

Both of the curves signify typical diesel engine combustion chemistry in which almost all HC
emissions are consumed within the cylinder. But maximum value increases because of
instantaneous heat release.

Fig 3.7 Variation of HC emission Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200
bTDC(right)
3.8 CO2 emission

Both the trends are almost similar. CO2 formation signifies the complete combustion.

Fig 3.8 Variation of CO2 Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200 bTDC (right)

3.9 CO emission

Almost all the CO is consumed in the cycle which is as per diesel engine combustion
chemistry.

Fig 3.9 Variation of CO Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200 bTDC (right)

3.10 NOx emission

As injection starts earlier, a better mixing of air and fuel takes place and hence higher
premixed combustion occurs due to which peak temperature increases, thus leading to higher
NOx emissions.
 Fig 3.10 Variation of NOx Vs crank angle with SOI 90 bTDC (left) and SOI 200 bTDC (right)

4. Conclusions

As an effect of early injection, the values of peak temperature and pressure increases and shift
towards TDC. Due to this higher temperature, emission of NOx increases. In early injection,
efficient combustion takes place with decrease in soot emission as more time is available for
homogenous mixture preparation inside the cylinder. From the results of early injection, it is
clear that early injection is beneficial in homogeneous mixture formation and efficient
combustion with a drawback of high peak pressure and peak temperature.

5. References

[1] Rudolf H. S., and Charles E. R., Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI):
Benefits, compromises and future engine applications, SAE Paper No. 1999-01-3682, 1999.

[2] Manimaran R., Karuppa R. T., Kumar K. S., Premixed Charge Compression Ignition in a
Direct Injection Diesel Engine using Computational Fluid Dynamics, WSEAS
TRANSACTIONS on HEAT and MASS TRANSFER, Paper no. E-ISSN: 2224-3461, 2013.

[3] Su H., Mosbach S., Kraft, M ., Bhave M., Kook, S., and Bae C., Two Stage Fuel Direct
Injection in a Diesel Fuelled HCCI Engine, SAE Paper No. 2007-01-1880, 2007.

[4] Sibendu S., Anita I., Ramirez, Douglas E., Longman , Aggarwal S. K., Effect of nozzle
orifice geometry on spray, combustion, and emission characteristics under diesel engine
conditions, FUEL, paper no. 2010.10.048, 2010.

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