PRESSURE MODULAION ON MICRO-MACHINED PORT FUEL INJECTOR PERFORMANCE

An experimental study was carried out to characterize the spray atomization process of micro-machined port fuel injectors with a piezoelectric atomization device, which can generate pressure pulsations through vibration of a piezoelectric transducer. In this study, several types of micro-machined arrays such as 30∼200-microns of hole arrays were tested. Both a dual-stream and a central-port injectors with micro-machined arrays were tested and compared with normal port fuel injectors. The spray visualization was conducted to characterize overall spray structure and phase Doppler particle analyzer (PDPA) system was used to quantify the droplet size and velocity. In addition, the pressure history was recorded by using digitized signal from pressure transducer. The results showed that modulation is effective to the spray atomization for tested injectors and atomization performance depends on injector design factors, orifice sizes, and frequency and power of the modulator. A number of resonance frequencies of the modulator was modified by injector parameters and temperature. In addition, our results suggested that design of sufficient space among holes is critical to avoid droplet coalescence in the multi-hole micro-machined injectors.