A General Rezoning Technique for KIVA3V Internal Combustion Engines CFD Simulations

A computational mesh is required when performing CFD-combustion modeling of internal combustion engines. For combustion chambers with moving pistons and valves, like those in typical cars and trucks, the combustion chamber shape changes continually in response to piston and valve motion. The combustion chamber mesh must then also change at each time step to reflect that change in geometry. The method of changing the mesh from one computational time step to the next is called rezoning. This paper introduces a new method of mesh rezoning for the KIVA3V CFD-combustion program. The standard KIVA3V code from Los Alamos National Laboratory comes with standard rezoners that very nicely handle mesh motion for combustion chambers whose mesh does not include valves and for those with flat heads employing vertical valves. For pent-roof and wedge-roof designs KIVA3V offers three rezoners to choose from, the choice depending on how similar a combustion chamber is to the sample combustion chambers that come with KIVA3V. Often, the rezoners must be modified for meshes of new combustion chamber geometries to allow the mesh to successfully capture change in geometry during the full engine cycle without errors. There is no formal way to approach these modifications; typically this requires a long trial and error process to get a mesh to work for a full engine cycle. The benefit of the new rezoner is that it replaces the three existing rezoners for canted valve configurations with a single rezoner and has much greater stability, so the need for ad hoc modifications of the rezoner is greatly reduced. This paper explains how the new rezoner works and gives examples of its use.