Pratice School Project Synopsis

Modeling of spray injection using CONVERGE

By:
Ankita Sodani, 8th Semester, Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Manipal. Reg: 080909532 +919619036617 ankita.sodani@gmail.com

Duration of project: 4 months (December 19, 2011 to May 2012) Organization: Industrial Research and Consultancy Centre, Indian Institute of Technology,
Bombay

External Guide: Prof. Sreedhara Sheshadri, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical

Engineering, IIT Bombay, Mumbai 400076 Email ID: sreedhara.s@iitb.ac.in Contact: +91 (22) 2576 7597

Internal Guide: Prof. Vishal Shenoy P, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical

Engineering, MIT, Manipal

About the Organization: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay is one of the leading
public research organisations. Every year it selects 50-100 under graduate and post graduate students from non-IITs and non-NITs to undertake a research project in their corresponding departments for four to six months.

Pratice School Project Synopsis

Introduction: Internal combustion engines are widely used because of their excellent power
to weight ratio and comparatively smaller size. Also, with the increasing demand of energy, stores of fossil fuel are depleting at an ever increasing rate. Though the diesel engine gives better thermal efficiency than the gasoline engine, there is a strong need to further improve their efficiency to meet the growing demand of energy. On the other hand, emissions from diesel engines have several negative effects on the environment and human health.

Project details: In this project, we will try to model the diesel spray injected into the
combustion chamber using CFD-tool Converge and find out the various parameters which affect the spray tip penetration length, Sauter Mean Diameter (SMD), diesel particle distribution in the chamber etc. When the spray tip penetration length is large, more and more unburnt fuel comes in contact with the cylinder walls and hence, the emission increases. Hence, with this project we try to find the optimum liquid penetration length for a particular diesel engine and the various factors on which it depends.

Software to be used, CONVERGE: Spray and combustion simulations are performed

using an EulerianLagrangian approach in CFD engine software CONVERGE. It incorporates state-of-the-art models for spray injection, atomization, turbulence, droplet collision and coalescence, combustion, and emissions processes. The Converge CFD-tool can be used for the simulation of three dimensional, incompressible or compressible, chemically reacting transient fluid flows in complex geometries with stationary or moving surfaces. Ease of gridding, adaptive mesh refinement capabilities and ease of parallelism made this tool very attractive. Converge CFD-tool is very useful in simulating IC engine problems as it has advanced turbulence, spray and combustion models with moving mesh capabilities. Mesh refinement and parallelism assure accurate results in a reasonable time. Mesh refines and becomes denser as the injection proceeds. Injection profile shape is given as an input. Using the input values of injection duration and mass of fuel injected, Converge CFD-tool scales the injection velocity profile to inject the specified mass of fuel in the specified crank angle duration. In this project, the cylindrical domain of IC engine is divided into several angular slices depending upon the number of injectors and their positions. Using a fairly accurate assumption of periodicity in the azimuthal direction, just one sector is simulated instead of the full cylinder to save computational time. Periodic boundary condition are applied on the inter sector boundary.

Post processing software Tecplot: Tecplot is the name of a family of visualization

software tools. In this project, we use Tecplot 360 for post-processing simulation results which is a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and numerical simulation software package .
2

Pratice School Project Synopsis

Literature Survey: During the literature survey, several papers from Society of Automotive
Engineers, Fuel Journal etc were referred and the following conclusions were made: Effect of injection parameters (Injection pressure, temperature), Nozzle geometry and nozzle diameter, Ambient conditions (Ambient temperature and pressure), Fuel properties (Viscosity, Temperature) on SMD, liquid penetration length have been widely studied using both experimental and numerical methods. Effect of the above said factors on coefficient of discharge and injection tip velocity is still to be widely explored. The use of CFD based softwares like Kiva and Fire is limited.

Methodology: The project has been divided into three major stages1. Understanding the code and software acquaintance: The initial three to four weeks were dedicated to the learning and practicing of the software which has to be used extensively throughout the internship. 2. Validation of the code: The code is being validated using experimental results from the paper titled A study on the effect of fuel viscosity and nozzle geometry on high injection pressure diesel spray characteristics. The operating conditions of the diesel engine being considered for the present analysis are same as those considered in the paper. A 60 constant volume sector model is used for the numerical analysis. Simulations are carried out based on the duration of injection. Fuels of different viscosity (Low, medium and high) are used in combination with a round inlet nozzle or sharp inlet nozzle. 3. Variation of parameters (Injection pressure, injection temperature, nozzle diameter, ambient pressure, ambient temperature etc) to find their effect on SMD and liquid penetration length.

Variation of Liquid penetration length / SMD with injection time: The following
graphs were obtained as part of the validation. The total duration of fuel injection was 1.95 ms using a high viscosity fuel and a round nozzle.
Liquid Penetration Length (m)
0.10000000000

0.08000000000
0.06000000000 0.04000000000 0.02000000000 0.00000000000 1 51 101 151

Time of injection (e-5 s)

Pratice School Project Synopsis

0.00006000000 0.00005500000 0.00005000000 0.00004500000 0.00004000000 0.00003500000 0.00003000000 0.00002500000 0.00002000000 0.00001500000 0.00001000000 0.00000500000 0.00000000000 1 51 101 151

Sauter Mean Diameter (m)

Time of injection (e-5 s)

A 60 constant volume sector model as seen in Tecplot: (The slice in the sector
shows the variation of temperature (Kelvin) at 1.3e-3 seconds from the beginning of injection. The black dots show the diesel injected in to the combustion chamber. The injector is located along the circumference providing 166 mg/ injection of the fuel.)

Pratice School Project Synopsis

References:
1. Effects of Gas Density and Vaporization on Penetration and Dispersion of Diesel Sprays. Jeffrey D. Naber and Dennis L. Siebers, SAE 960034, 1996. 2. Effect of nozzle orifice geometry on spray, combustion, and emission characteristics under diesel engine conditions. Sibendu Soma, Anita I. Ramirez, Douglas E. Longman, Suresh K. Aggarwal , Fuel 90 (2011)1267-1276, 2011. 3. Liquid-Phase Fuel Penetration in Diesel Sprays. Dennis L. Siebers, SAE 980809, 1998. 4. Fuel effect on the liquid-phase penetration of an evaporating spray under transient diesel-like conditions. J.V. Pastor, J.M. Garca-Oliver, J.-G. Nerva, B. Gimnez, Fuel 90 (2011)3369-3381, 2011. 5. Effect of ambient pressure on penetration of a diesel spray. I.V. Roisman, Lucio Araneo, C. Tropea, International Journal of Multiphase Flow 33 (2007) 904920, 2007, 2007.