Effects of flame-plane wall impingement on diesel combustion and soot processes

Abstract

This work aims to assess the effects of flame-wall impingement on the combustion and soot processes of diesel flames. For this work, experimental measurements were performed in a constant-volume combustion chamber (CVCC) at ambient conditions that are representative of compression-ignition engines. The characteristics of impinging and free flames were compared at two identical ambient and injector conditions (20.8 kg/m3 ambient density, 6 MPa ambient pressure, 1000 K bulk temperature, 15 and 10 vol% ambient O2 concentration, and 100 MPa injection pressure). To simulate flame-wall impingement, a flat plane steel wall, normal to the injector axis, was initially placed at 53 mm from nozzle, but was varied from 53 to 35 mm during the experiments. Under the test conditions of this work, it was found that wall impingement resulted in lower soot temperature and soot content, in addition to a loss of momentum for the wall jet. The results also revealed that decreasing impingement distance from the nozzle resulted in reduced soot temperature and soot level for the wall jet. The reduced soot content observed for the wall jet appeared to be mainly driven by enhanced mixing. Flame transparency modeling was also performed to assess the uncertainties of two-color measurements for flame-plane wall impingement. The analysis indicated that the derived soot temperature and concentration values would be affected by the actual temperature profiles, rendering the technique useful to reveal trends, but not reliable for absolute soot concentration measurements.