Computational Analysis of Combustion of High and Low Cetane Fuels in a Compression Ignition Engine

Past research has shown that combustion of low cetane fuels in CI engines results in higher fuel conversion efficiencies. However, when high-cetane fuels like diesel are substituted with low-cetane fuels like gasoline, the engine operation tends to suffer from high CO emissions at low loads and combustion noise at high loads. In this paper, we present a computational analysis of a light-duty CI engine operating on diesel, kerosene and gasoline. These fuels cover a range of cetane numbers from 46 for diesel to 25 for gasoline. Similar to experiments, the model predicted higher CO at low load operation with gasoline. Predictions of in-cylinder details were utilized to understand differences in combustion characteristics of the three fuels. The in-cylinder mass contours and the evolution of model predicted in-cylinder mixture in Φ–T coordinates were then used to explain the emission trends. From the analysis, over-mixing due to early single injection was identified as the reason for high CO with low load gasoline Low Temperature Combustion (LTC). Additional simulations were performed by introducing techniques like cetane enhancement, adding hot EGR and variation of the injection scheme. Their effects on low load gasoline LTC were studied. Finally, it is shown that use of a dual pulse injection scheme with hot EGR helped to reduce the CO emissions for low load gasoline LTC while maintaining low NOx emissions.