Non-Evaporating Kerosene Fuel Spray Tip Penetration: A Comparison between Phenomenological Models and Experiments

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Interest in the use of kerosene fuel in diesel engines has garnered researchers’ attention in the past few years due to its improve premixed combustion and its ability to decrease soot emission. The potential of using kerosene in the design stage of a diesel engine is thus a great motivator to study fuel spray development and to evaluate known fuel spray tip correlations and models with respect to their predictive capability with such a fuel. Therefore, the present paper proposes to investigate the spray development of a multi-hole solenoid injector fueled with kerosene under non-evaporative conditions. Moreover, the experimental results are used to evaluate how different phenomenological models proposed in the literature for diesel fuel are able to predict kerosene spray tip penetration. The experimental test rig is composed of a constant-volume pressurized vessel and a camera allowing to visualize the liquid phase using a backlight illumination technique. The influence of the injection pressure is studied at 400, 800 and 1600 bar, while three different injection durations (0.5, 1, and 2 ms) and five ambient pressures (2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 bar) are investigated. The experimental results are presented using a nondimensional time and fuel spray tip penetration to facilitate the analysis. The results show, as expected, that increasing the injection pressure or decreasing the ambient pressure results in a faster fuel spray tip penetration. The models that are evaluated include a constant ambient density hypothesis formulation, a variable ambient density model and three empirical correlations. A comparison between the models and experimental results shows that low injection pressure and short injection duration are two conditions in which the models have difficulty to predict the fuel spray tip penetration. Overall, the best performance was offered by the variable density model, which predicted the experimental data well.</div></div>