Publications
Advanced Light-Duty Spark Ignition Engine Research: Co-Optimization of Fuels and Engines and Partnership to Advance Combustion Engines (FY2020 Annual Progress Report)
This report covers recent progress on research tasks that support both the Co-Optimization of Fuels and Engines (Co-Optima) initiative and the Partnership to Advance Combustion Engines (PACE) consortium. The Co-Optima tasks further the science-base needed by industry stakeholders to co-evolve the next generation of highly efficient direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines and new gasoline-type fuels. The research emphasis is on fuel effects on multimode spark ignition (SI) engine operation, which uses traditional non-dilute stoichiometric operation for peak load and power but reverts to lean operation at lower loads to provide higher fuel economy. This work focuses on determining desirable fuel specifications in terms of well-established metrics like research octane number (RON) and motor octane number, but it also involves the assessment of new fuel metrics, including fuel sooting propensity and phi-sensitivity. The PACE task supports the development of predictive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling, which promises to unlock new strategies for high-efficiency combustion while minimizing tailpipe emissions. Here, the primary fuel is a regular E10 gasoline (i.e., a regular gasoline blend containing 10% ethanol), and focus is on fuel-spray dynamics and soot emissions. Soot-formation pathways are studied to determine how the pathways change with injection strategies and the thermal state of the engine (i.e., cold-starting vs. fully warmed-up operation). This PACE task also contributed to the development of an optimal E10 gasoline surrogate fuel, as reported in detail elsewhere