Optical investigations on lean combustion improvement of natural gas engines via turbulence enhancement

In the global background of“Carbon Peak”and“Carbon Neutral”,natural gas engines show great advantages in energy-saving and pollution reduction.However,natural gas engines suffer from the issues of combustion instabilities when operating under lean burning conditions.In this paper,the role of turbulence enhancement in improving the lean combustion of natural gas was investigated in an optical SI engine with high compression ratios.Variable swirl control valves(SCV)were designed and intake tumble and swirl were combined to regulate turbulent motion and turbulent intensity.Particle image velocimetry was employed to measure in-cylinder turbulence,and transient pressure acquisition and high-speed photography were synchronously performed to quantify combustion evolutions.The results show that incylinder turbulent intensity is enhanced significantly through reducing SCV closing angles.Such that flame propagation speed and thermal efficiency are significantly improved with an increment of turbulent intensity,which indicated that mean effective pressures are not sensitive to spark timing.The analysis of flame images shows that the combined turbulence increases in the radial orientation from the spark plug to the cylinder wall,leading to an earlier flame kernel formation and a faster burning rate.Therefore,the combined turbulence has the potential in reducing the cyclic variations of lean combustion in natural gas engines.

Counter-Rotating Type Pump-Turbine Unit Cooperating with Wind Power Unit

This serial research proposes the hybrid power system combined the wind power unit with the counter-rotating type pump-turbine unit,to provide the constant output for the grid system,even at the suddenly fluctuating/turbulent wind.In this paper,the tandem impellers of the counter-rotating type pumping unit was operated at the turbine mode,and the performances and the flow conditions were investigated numerically and experimentally.The 3-D turbulent flows in the runners were simulated at the steady state condition by using the commercial CFD code of ANSYS-CFX ver.12 with the SST turbulence model.While providing the pump unit for the turbine mode,the maximum hydraulic efficiency is close to one of the counter-rotating type hydroelectric unit designed exclu-sively for the turbine mode.Besides,the runner/impeller of the unit works evidently so as to coincide the angularmomentum change through the front runners/impellers with that through the rear runners/impellers,namely to take the axial flow at not only the inlet but also the outlet without the guide vanes.These results show that this type of unit is effective to work at not only the pumping but also the turbine modes.