In light- and medium-duty diesel engines, piston bowl shape influences thermal efficiency, either due to changes in wall heat loss or to changes in the heat release rate. The relative contributions of these two factors are not clearly described in the literature. In this work, two production piston bowls are adapted for use in a single cylinder research engine: a conventional, re-entrant piston, and a stepped-lip piston. An injection timing sweep is performed at constant load with each piston, and heat release analyses provide information about thermal efficiency, wall heat loss, and the degree of constant volume combustion. Zero-dimensional thermodynamic simulations provide further insight and support for the experimental results. The effect of bowl geometry on wall heat loss depends on injection timing, but changes in wall heat loss cannot explain changes in efficiency. Late cycle heat release is faster with the stepped-lip bowl than with the conventional re-entrant bowl, which leads to a higher degree of constant volume combustion and therefore higher thermal efficiency. This effect also depends on injection timing. In general, increasing the degree of constant volume combustion is significantly more effective at improving thermal efficiency than decreasing wall heat loss. Maximizing thermal efficiency will require a deeper understanding of how bowl geometry impacts flow structure, turbulent mixing, and mixing-controlled combustion.
For a pilot-main injection strategy in a single-cylinder light-duty diesel engine, the dwell between the pilot- and main-injection events can significantly impact combustion noise. As the solenoid energizing dwell decreases below 200 ls, combustion noise decreases by approximately 3 dB and then increases again at shorter dwells. A zero-dimensional thermodynamic model has been developed to capture the combustion noise reduction mechanism; heat release (HR) profiles are the primary simulation input and approximating them as top-hat shapes preserves the noise reduction effect. A decomposition of the terms of the underlying thermodynamic equation reveals that the direct influence of HR on the temporal variation of cylinder pressure is primarily responsible for the trend in combustion noise. Fourier analyses reveal the mechanism responsible for the reduction in combustion noise as a destructive interference in the frequency range between approximately 1 kHz and 3 kHz. This interference is dependent on the timing of increases in cylinder pressure during pilot HR relative to those during main HR. The mechanism by which combustion noise is attenuated is fundamentally different from the traditional noise reduction that occurs with the use of long-dwell pilot injections, for which noise is reduced primarily by shortening the ignition delay of the main injection. Band-pass filtering of measured cylinder pressure traces provides evidence of this noise reduction mechanism in the real engine. When this close-coupled pilot noise reduction mechanism is active, metrics derived from cylinder pressure such as the location of 50% HR, peak HR rates, and peak rates of pressure rise cannot be used reliably to predict trends in combustion noise. The quantity and peak value of the pilot HR affect the combustion noise reduction mechanism, and maximum noise reduction is achieved when the height and steepness of the pilot HR profile are similar to the initial rise of the main HR event. A variation of the initial rise rate of the main HR event reveals trends in combustion noise that are the opposite of what would happen in the absence of a close-coupled pilot. The noise reduction mechanism shown in this work may be a powerful tool to improve the tradeoffs among fuel efficiency, pollutant emissions, and combustion noise.
In-cylinder flow measurements are necessary to gain a fundamental understanding of swirl-supported, light-duty Diesel engine processes for high thermal efficiency and low emissions. Planar particle image velocimetry (PIV) can be used for non-intrusive, in situ measurement of swirl-plane velocity fields through a transparent piston. In order to keep the flow unchanged from all-metal engine operation, the geometry of the transparent piston must adapt the production-intent metal piston geometry. As a result, a temporally- and spatially-variant optical distortion is introduced to the particle images. To ensure reliable measurement of particle displacements, this work documents a systematic exploration of optical distortion quantification and a hybrid back-projection procedure that combines ray-tracing-based geometric and in situ manual back-projection approaches. The proposed hybrid back-projection method for the first time provides a time-efficient and robust way to process planar PIV measurements conducted in an optical research engine with temporally- and spatially-varying optical distortion. This method is based upon geometric ray tracing and serves as a universal tool for the correction of optical distortion with an arbitrary but axisymmetric piston crown window geometry. Analytical analysis demonstrates that the ignorance of optical distortion change during the PIV laser temporal interval may induce a significant error in instantaneous velocity measurements. With the proposed digital dewarping method, this piston-motion-induced error can be eliminated. Uncertainty analysis with simulated particle images provides guidance on whether to back-project particle images or back-project velocity fields in order to minimize dewarping-induced uncertainties. The optimal implementation is piston-geometry-dependent. For regions with significant change in nominal magnification factor, it is recommended to apply the proposed back-projection approach to particle images prior to PIV interrogation. For regions with significant dewarping-induced particle elongation (Ep > 3), it is recommended to apply the proposed dewarping method to the vector fields resulting from PIV interrogation of raw particle image pairs.