Experimental Investigations of Cycle-to-Cycle and Cylinder-to-Cylinder Variation of PCCI Combustion With High Injection Pressures

Recently HCCI combustion concept has gained the attention of industry and academia due to its potential to reduce NOx and PM emissions simultaneously from diesel engines. The HCCI concept also called as Partially-Premixed Charge Compression Ignition (PCCI) when heavy fuel like diesel is used as fuel. To achieve homogeneous mixture of diesel+air+residual gases, high injection pressures are required with fine atomization. The cycle-to-cycle and cylinder-to-cylinder variations in rail pressure and EGR ratio caused to variations in engine performance. In this study combustion stabilities and cycle-to-cycle variations of diesel engine operated in PCCI combustion mode were investigated at different fuel injection pressures on a 4-cylinder, 4-stroke diesel engine. The experiments were conducted with 500bar, 1000bar, 1500bar and 1800bar injection pressures at low load (IMEP = 2bar) and 50% load (IMEP = 8.5bar) at 2500 and 3000 rpm. No EGR was used at low load condition and 50% EGR was used at 50% load at all injection pressures. In-cylinder pressures of 100 cycles were recorded for each test conditions running with PCCI mode. Consequently, cycle-to-cycle variations of the maximum Rate of Heat Release (ROHR_max), maximum Total Heat Release (THR_max), IMEP and P_max were analyzed and evaluated using Coefficient of Variation (COV) of each parameter. The significant difference in COV from cylinder-to-cylinder was observed at higher injection pressures. With high injection pressures, wide range of cycle-to-cycle variations were observed in engines operated in PCCI combustion mode limiting the injection pressure and operating range of engine. The results show that the injection pressure need to be optimized with respect to load to control the PCCI combustion at constant EGR ratio to minimize the cycle-to-cycle variations and also extend the operating range of PCCI mode.