Heat Release Analysis of Oxygen-Enriched Diesel Combustion

A heat release correlation for oxygen-enriched diesel combustion is being developed through heat release analysis of cylinder pressure data from a single-cylinder diesel engine operating under various levels of oxygen enrichment. Results show that standard combustion correlations available in the literature do not accurately describe oxygen-enriched diesel combustion. A novel functional form is therefore proposed, which is shown to reproduce measured heat release profiles closely, under different operating conditions and levels of oxygen enrichment. The mathematical complexity of the associated curve-fitting problem is maintained at the same level of difficulty as for standard correlations. When the novel correlation is incorporated into a computer simulation of diesel engine operation with oxygen enrichment, the latter predicts pressure traces in excellent agreement with measured pressure data. This demonstrates the potential of the proposed combustion simulation to guide the application of oxygen-enriched technology successfully to a variety of multicylinder diesel systems.