The role of the diffusion-limited injection in direct dual fuel stratification

Abstract

Low-temperature combustion offers an attractive combination of high thermal efficiency and low NO x and soot formation at moderate engine load. However, the kinetically-controlled nature of low-temperature combustion yields little authority over the rate of heat release, resulting in a tradeoff between load, noise, and thermal efficiency. While several single-fuel strategies have achieved full-load operation through the use of equivalence ratio stratification, they uniformly require retarded combustion phasing to maintain reasonable noise levels, which comes at the expense of thermal efficiency and combustion stability. Previous work has shown that control over heat release can be greatly improved by combining reactivity stratification in the premixed charge with a diffusion-limited injection that occurs after low-temperature heat release, in a strategy called direct dual fuel stratification. While the previous work has shown how the heat release control offered by direct dual fuel stratification differs from other strategies and how it is enabled by the reactivity stratification created by using two fuels, this paper investigates the effects of the diffusion-limited injection. In particular, the influence of fuel selection and the pressure, timing, and duration of the diffusion-limited injection are examined. Diffusion-limited injection fuel type had a large impact on soot formation, but no appreciable effect on performance or other emissions. Increasing injection pressure was observed to decrease filter smoke number exponentially while improving combustion efficiency. The timing and duration of the diffusion-limited injection offered precise control over the heat release event, but the operating space was limited by a tradeoff between NO x and soot.