A CFD Cold Flow Analysis of Different Piston Configurations for Internal Combustion Engine

Abstract

AbstractAmong all the automotive components, the engine pistons are the most crucial component with lot of design complexity and importance. In the internal combustion (IC) engines, the most important parameter affecting the performance is the combustion chamber design, thus optimizing the same is essential to get the desired performance. In this research, a computational flow dynamics (CFD) analysis of four combustion chamber patterns, such as recessed piston shape, dome, flat, and concave-shaped piston profile was studied for two-valve four-stroke IC engine, using ANSYS Fluent 16.2 Academic Version. The velocity magnitudes, swirl ratio, cross tumble ratio, and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) were analyzed for the different profiles. The velocity magnitude was highest in flat piston profile at 540 crank angle degree (CAD), in dome-shaped piston at 520 CAD and in concave-shaped piston at 590 CAD. The swirl ratio was more for concave and recessed piston. The highest cross tumble ratio was achieved by flat profile. The flat profile had maximum turbulent kinetic energy at 540 CAD. Thus, overall performance with more efficient and better fluid dynamics was achieved by flat profile piston configuration in SI engine, in cold flow analysis.KeywordsPiston head profileCFD analysisIC engineTurbulent kinetic energyTumble Ratio