The improved fuel economy and low pollutant emissions are highly demanded for internal combustion engines. Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engine is the one of promising devices for highly efficient engine. However, GDI engines generally tend to emit more Particulate Matter (PM) than Port Fuel Injection (PFI) engine because the fuel sprayed from the injector can easily attach to the wall, which is the major origin of PM. Therefore, the precise analysis of the fuel/air mixture formation and the prediction of emissions are required. From the view of industrial use, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) becomes a necessary tool for the various analyses including the fuel/air mixture formation, spray attachment on the cylinder wall, the in-cylinder turbulence formation, the combustion and emission etc.
In our previous study, the flow and spray simulation in internal combustion engine has been conducted using OpenFOAM®, the open-source CFD toolbox. Since the engine involves the dynamic motion such as valve and piston, the morphing and mapping approach was employed. Furthermore, by virtue of open-source code, we have developed the methodology of the hybrid simulation from the internal nozzle flow to the fuel/air mixture in order to take into account detailed breakup process nearby injector nozzle.
We expand the above research to the combustion simulation. For the combustion model, the Hyperbolic Tangent Approximation (HTA) model is adopted. The HTA model has a simple form of equation and one can easily implement; moreover, the HTA model has the following features: 1. capability of both laminar and turbulent flow, 2. the clearness of analytical derivation based on the functional approximation of the reaction progress variable distribution in a one-dimensional laminar flame. In the current study, the premixed flame is studied on a gasoline combustion engine. The simulations for in-cylinder engine are conducted with different Air/Fuel (A/F) ratio conditions, and the results are compared with the experimental results. The in-cylinder pressure agrees well with experimental results and the validity of the current methodology is confirmed.
