Numerical analysis and visualization of natural gas jet with multi-point injection system

Abstract

Aiming at the change in intake air flow caused by the injection of natural gas in intake manifold ifone simply replaces the gasoline injector with natural gas injector with the installing position of injector in intake manifold unchanged, and also the reflection of gas toward intake manifold inlet resulted from the impingement between the injected large volumetric natural gas jet and intake valve, an impulsively started natural gas jet injected from a gas injector is characterized as a three-dimensional unsteady compressible viscous turbulent flow, based on which its transient development process is numerically analyzed using general-purpose CFD codes. The predicted velocity vector maps show a vortex, which indicates the occurrence of an unsteady state jet region, is formed downstream of the jet. A schlieren apparatus is utilized to get several groups of visible schlieren photographs of natural gas jets. In the experiment, photographs of natural gas jets taken by a CCD camera are laid in a portrait processor where the shapes, tip penetration distance and injection angles of the gas jets are investigated. Comparisons between predicted results and measurements indicate an excellent agreement between simulations and experimental results.