Graduate Research and Discovery Symposium (GRADS)

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Spring 2015

Abstract

Energy security concerns and abundant supply of Natural Gas in US provide impetus for engine designers to consider alternative gaseous fuels in existing engines. Dual-fuel Natural Gas (NG) engine concept is attractive due to minimal design changes, ability to preserve high Compression ratio (CR) of the baseline diesel, and reduce fuel cost without imposing consumer range anxiety. However, increased complexity of the dual-fuel engine poses challenges, including auto-ignition of end NG-air mixture (knock) at high loads, flame propagation limit at low load and transient response of an engine with directly injected diesel fuel and injection of Compressed NG upstream of the intake manifold. Predictive simulation of the complete engine system is an invaluable tool for investigations of such conditions and development of dual-fuel control strategies. Simulation work gives a better understanding of dual-fuel combustion nature, enables investigation of a broader operating space and complement results by providing values of parameters that cannot be easily measured from experiment. Additionally, with increased complexity of modern engines, map-based control becomes abundant and costly. A combustion model with sufficient level of predictiveness and reasonable requirement on calculation effort enables opportunities for model based control development.

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