Abstract
Utilizing fuel and oxidizing mixtures of oxygen and argon in spark ignition (SI) engines have been shown to increase thermal efficiency relative to standard fuel and air oxidizing mixtures due to the increased ratio of specific heats [1], [2] et. al. Motivated by these results, stoichiometric methane mixtures with various oxidizing volumetric ratios of argon and oxygen (90/10, 85/15, 80/20) are explored and studied in a simulated research engine in a fuel port injection configuration. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and combustion simulations using reduced chemical kinetic mechanisms were performed to investigate overall combustion performance and thermodynamic efficiencies. A successive approach of increasingly higher dimensional models (zero dimensional, quasi one dimensional, and three dimensional CFD) with adiabatic, Angelberger, and Woschni heat loss models are compared in the context of thermodynamic theory. Significantly higher efficiency gains on the order of 10% relative to standard fuel and air oxidizing mixtures are predicted.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 2017 Fall Technical Meeting of the Western States Section of the Combustion Institute, WSSCI 2017 |
| Publisher | Western States Section/Combustion Institute |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2017 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-12-31Acknowledgements: This investigation was conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and was supported in part by the CEC EISG PIER grant # 58074A/14-07G. Additionally, this research used Chemkin and an in-house FORTRAN Engine Analysis code of which there are multiple authors and contributors. In addition, CONVERGE[5] was used to perform the three-dimensional CFD computations. Countless open source and GNU licensed software packages were utilized through out the progress of this project and report including VisIt[6] and Gnuplot for post processing.