Improvement of Poppet Valve Injection Performance in Large-Bore Natural Gas Engines

Poppet valves have been used as fuel delivery mechanisms in internal combustion engines due to their excellent sealing characteristics. For example, in large-bore stationary natural gas engines, gas is directly injected by a poppet valve into the engine cylinder. The objectives of this paper are to show that a significant amount of stagnation pressure is lost during the gas flow through a conventional poppet valve and to suggest design improvements to obtain more efficient poppet valves with reduced stagnation pressure loss. In this paper, simple converging-diverging nozzles are incorporated into the poppet valve configuration to reduce the stagnation pressure loss originating from compressible flow structures. Numerical simulations of the gas flow through various poppet valve geometries were performed. Both push and pull poppet valve geometries with nozzle were studied. The stagnation pressure losses, momentum delivery downstream and downstream flow characteristics of the jets from conventional poppet valves and the modified valves were compared. A pressure-based valve injection efficiency was defined and used to compare the valve injection performance. A mixing fraction parameter was also defined to compare valve performance in a moving piston simulation. The results indicate that a conventional poppet valve is an inefficient mechanism to deliver momentum to the fuel-air mixture. Comparison of the results indicates that it is possible to make significant improvements of injection performance in momentum delivery by incorporating well-designed nozzles into the poppet valve geometry.