Tiny pollutant emissions of a dimethyl ether fuelled engine

Emissions of dimethyl ether(DME) fuelled engines were investigated by orthogonal experiments on a ZS195 diesel engine.The study mainly focused on the tiny pollutant emissions of formaldehyde(CH2O),methyl formate(CH3OCHO) and formic acid(HCOOH).The presence of CH2O,CH3OCHO and HCOOH are proved in the exhaust by gas chromatograph and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.The analysis of variance results indicate that the fuel delivery advance angle is the most important factor for CH2O emission.The fuel delivery advance angle and the interaction of injection pressure and nozzle diameter are considerable factors for unburned hydrocarbon(UHC) emission.The mechanism forming tiny pollutants,primarily through CH2O formation,is suggested to be similar to the mechanism forming UHC by DME partial oxidation existing in crevices and boundary zones,and is verified via DME combustion simulation of a multizone chemical kinetic model.

Numerical modeling of dimethyl ether (DME) bubble growth and breakup

A numerical program is written to simulate the process of vapor bubble growth with spherical symmetry from the thermodynamic critical radius in an initially uniformly superheated liquid. The program is validated by the experimental data of superheated water. The calculated results agree with those of experiments well. The program takes into account the variations of properties with temperature precisely to simulate the DME bubble growth under flash boiling conditions. Considering the influences of pressure, surface tension and viscous stress, the linear stability analysis method is adopted to deduce the dispersion equation to represent the disturbance development during the bubble growth, and a new criterion for bubble breakup is established. The results show the bubble becomes more unstable with the increase of bubble Weber number and void fraction, and that with the increase of bubble growth rate or the decrease of initial radius ration of droplet to bubble, the breakup time of bubble becomes shorter.

Algorithms for improving accuracy of spray simulation

Fuel spray is the pivotal process of direct injection engine combustion.The accuracy of spray simula- tion determines the reliability of combustion calculation.However,the traditional techniques of spray simulation in KIVA and commercial CFD codes are very susceptible to grid resolution.As a conse- quence,predicted engine performance and emission can depend on the computational mesh.The two main causes of this problem are the droplet collision algorithm and coupling between gas and liquid phases.In order to improve the accuracy of spray simulation,the original KIVA code is modified using the cross mesh droplet collision(CMC)algorithm and gas phase velocity interpolation algorithm.In the constant volume apparatus and D.I.diesel engine,the improvements of the modified KIVA code in spray simulation accuracy are checked from spray structure,predicted average drop size and spray tip penetration,respectively.The results show a dramatic decrease in grid dependency.With these changes,the distorted phenomenon of spray structure is vanished.The uncertainty in predicted aver- age drop size is reduced from 30 to 5μm in constant volume apparatus calculation,and the uncertainty is further reduced to 2μm in an engine simulation.The predicted spray tip penetrations in engine simulation also have better consistency in medium and fine meshes.