Computational Analysis of the Effects of Spray Parameters and Piston Shape on Syngas-Diesel Dual-Fuel Engine Combustion Process

In this study, a 3D CFD analysis method for the combustion process was established for a low calorific value syngas-diesel dual-fuel engine operating under very lean fuel-air mixture condition. Also, the accuracy of computational analysis was evaluated by comparing the experimental results with the computed ones. To simulate the combustion for the dual-fuel engine, a new dual-fuel chemical kinetics set was used that was constituted by merging two verified chemical kinetic sets: n-heptane (173 species) for diesel and Gri-mech 3.0 (53 species) for syngas. For dual-fuel mode operations, the early stage of combustion was dominated by the fuel burning inside or near the spray plume. After which, the flame propagated into the syngas in the piston bowl and then proceeded toward the syngas in the squish zone. With the baseline injection system and piston shape, a significant amount of unburned syngas was discharged. To solve this problem, effects of the injection parameters and piston shape on combustion characteristics were analyzed by calculation. The change in injection variables toward increasing the spray plume volume or the penetration length were effective to cause fast burning in the vicinity of TDC by widening the spatial distribution of diesel acting as a seed of auto-ignition. As a result, the unburned syngas fraction was reduced. Changing the piston shape with the shallow depth of the piston bowl and 20% squish area ratio had a significant effect on the combustion pattern and lessened the unburned syngas fraction by half.