Numerical Study on Evaporation of Lubricating Oil Droplets Under Natural Gas Engine Conditions

The distribution of lubricating oil droplets in cylinder is one of main causes of abnormal combustion of natural gas engines. The evaporation of lubricating oil droplet is one of the key sub-processes controlling its auto-ignition event. The components of lubricating oil with different carbon number (16–50) shows significantly different evaporation and ignition characteristics from gasoline and diesel fuels. Even though there are many evaporation models focusing on the evaporation behaviors of multi-component droplets, most of them are limited to the liquid fuels, which are composed by more volatile hydrocarbons. Therefore, understanding the evaporation characteristics of lubricating oil droplets is very important for investigating the mechanism of abnormal combustion of natural gas engines. In this study, a multi-component evaporation model for lubricating oil was developed, which considers several key characteristics in the droplet evaporation process, including the finite heat conduction and limited mass diffusion in liquid phase, multi-component diffusion in gas phase, real vapor-liquid equilibrium at the droplet interface, as well as the nitrogen quantity dissolved in liquid phase. The simulation results by this model were compared with experimental results, and good agreements have been achieved. Then, this model was used to study the evaporation behaviors of different hydrocarbon droplets, including lubricating oil droplet. The influences of ambient temperatures and pressures, as well as methane concentration on evaporation characteristics (namely the heat up period, average evaporation rate, and droplet lifetime) were investigated. The results show that both heat up period and evaporation rate of lubricating oil droplets increase as the methane concentration increases. Besides, the droplet lifetime monotonically decreases as the ambient pressure decreases. This is different from the diesel and gasoline droplets, for which the effects of pressure on the droplet evaporation behaviors are depended on the ambient temperature.