Numerical Investigation of In-chamber Flow inside a Wankel Rotary Engine

Abstract

In this paper the in-house technique mesh moving function based on AVL-FIRE has been developed as a simulation tool to investigate the in-chamber flow phenomena of the Wankel rotary engine. The meshes from the starting rotor position at 165° BTDC until the ending rotor position at top dead center (TDC) have been created and connected together. The numerical simulations between an intake stroke and the end of a compression stroke have been successively performed. The results are validated with the selected publication on various engine speeds, at 675 rpm and 1170 rpm. In parallel three refinements of meshes have been carried out, in order to optimize the suitable meshes’ elements for the calculation of this engine type. In addition, the turbulence models, which are standard k-ε and Large Eddy Simulations (LES), have been varied for detailed investigation of their predictive capabilities. The simulation results show that the flow phenomena are well corresponding to the experimental data in both engine speeds, especially with the LES. It could be also identified that the LES model performs better on predicting the flow field both in directions and characteristics. Moreover, there is no evidently difference on the results between the medium (c.a. 100,000 elements) and fine (c.a. 1,000,000 elements) meshes comparing to the experimental results.