Abstract
The Positive Crankcase Ventilation (PCV) system in a car engine is designed to lower the pressure in the crankcase, which otherwise could lead to oil leaks and seal damage. The rotation of crankshaft in the crankcase causes the churn up of oil which conducts to occurrence of oil droplets which in turn may end in the PCV exhaust air intended to be re-injected in the engine admission. The oil catch can (OCC) is a device designed to trap these oil droplets, allowing the air to escape from the crankcase with the lowest content of oil as possible and thus, reducing the generation and emission of extra pollutants during the combustion of the air-fuel mixture. The main purpose of this paper is to optimize the design of a typical OCC used in many commercial cars by varying the length of its inner tube and the relative position of the outlet from radial to tangential fitting to the can body. For this purpose, CFD parametric analysis is performed to compute a one-way coupled Lagrangian-Eulerian two-phase flow simulation of the engine oil droplets driven by the air flow stream running through the device. The study was performed using the finite volume method with second-order spatial discretization scheme on governing equations in the Solid Works-EFD CFD platform. The turbulence was modelled using the k-? model with wall functions. Numerical results have proved that maximum efficiency is obtained for the longest inner tube and the tangential position of the outlet; however, it is recommended further investigation to assess the potential erosion on the bottom of the can under such a design configuration.
Highlights
Manufacturers of motor vehicles design their products in accordance with external factors such as governmentHow to cite this paper: Abilgaziyev, A., Nogerbek, N. and Rojas-Solórzano, L. (2015) Design Optimization of an Oil-Air Catch Can Separation System
In addition to the air-fuel mixture, there exists a large possibility of appearance of condensation and oil droplets [1]
Some cans have pretty simple designs that consist of simple empty housing, inlet and outlet tube
Summary
Manufacturers of motor vehicles design their products in accordance with external factors such as governmentHow to cite this paper: Abilgaziyev, A., Nogerbek, N. and Rojas-Solórzano, L. (2015) Design Optimization of an Oil-Air Catch Can Separation System. A small amount of that ignited mixture leaks through the piston ring seals and ends up in the crankcase. With the development of manufacturing industry, the fabrication of OCCs has evolved and there exist various designs of cans [8]. The more advanced designs include internal baffling, which provides more surface area for the oil to be collected, e.g. baffled OCC made by Mishimoto [9]. Though both of these approaches work, the simpler design is much less efficient than the complex unit
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