Distribution of Two-Stage Direct Injection CNG-Air Mixture near Lean Limit Using CFD

Abstract

Previous work shows that gas-jet ignition with two-stage injection technique is effective to extend lean combustible ranges of CNG engines. In this report, the robustness of the gas-jet ignition with two-stage injection method was investigated purposely to improve the performance of a lean burn direct injection CNG engine. The experiment was conducted using an engine at speed of 900 rpm, fuel-injection-pressure of 3MPa, equivalence ratio at 0.8, and ignition timing at top dead center. The effect of first injection timing on the test engine performance and exhaust emission was analyzed. First injection timings near the gas-jet ignition produced unstable combustion with occurrence of misfires except at a timing which produced distinctively good combustion with low HC and CO emissions. Computational fluid dynamics was used to provide hindsight of the fuel-air mixture distribution that might be the cause of misfires occurrence at certain injection timings.