Studies on variable swirl intake system for DI diesel engine using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

It is known that a helical port is more effective than a tangential port to attain the required swirl ratio with minimum sacrifice in the volumetric efficiency. The swirl port is designed for lesser swirl ratio to reduce emissions at higher speeds. But this condition increases the air fuel mixing time and particulate smoke emissions at lower speeds. Optimum swirl ratio is necessary according to the engine operating condition for optimum combustion and emission reduction. Hence the engine needs variable swirl to enhance the combustion in the cylinder according to its operating conditions, for example at partial load or low speed condition it requires stronger swirl, while the air quantity is more important than the swirl under very high speed or full load and maximum torque conditions. The swirl and charging quantity can easily trade off and can be controlled by the opening of the valve. Hence in this study the steady flow rig experiment is used to evaluate the swirl of a helical intake port design for different operating conditions. The variable swirl plate set up of the W06DTIE2 engine is used to experimentally study the swirl variation for different openings of the valve. The sliding of the swirl plate results in the variation of the area of inlet port entry. Therefore in this study a swirl optimized combustion system varying according to the operating conditions by a variable swirl plate mechanism is studied experimentally and compared with the computational fluid dynamics predictions. In this study the fluent computational fluid dynamics code has been used to evaluate the flow in the port-cylinder system of a DI diesel engine in a steady flow rig. The computational grid is generated directly from 3-D CAD data and in cylinder flow simulations, with inflow boundary conditions from experimental measurements, are made using the fluent computational fluid dynamics code. The results are in very good agreement with experimental results.