Inside a DISI engine, a wide range of pressure and temperature conditions are possible, and with the current evolution of the systems, many of the conditions are subject to be encountered at the moment of injection. Given the great differences between Diesel injectors and GDi fuel injectors, the effects of such conditions on the development of the fuel injected can cause phenomena like flash boiling and spray collapse that fundamentally change the behavior of sprays. In this work, the Spray G injector developed by Delphi for the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) group has been tested in a High Pressure High Temperature Constant Pressure Flow Rig (HPHT - CPFR) in a wide range of experimental conditions capturing the liquid and vapor phases of the spray by means of DBI and Schlieren imaging. The work presents the results obtained by spray visualization through comparisons of parametric variations with special focus on the collapse of the spray that occurs under high ambient temperature and density conditions. Spray collapse has been described by showing the direct increase that can cause in spray penetration and the great closing effect that can produce to the aperture of the spray (spray angle). Several contour comparisons using the raw images and the detected contours have been discussed in order to support and further explain the observed trends. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Gasoline direct injection (GDI) sprays are complex multiphase flows. When compared to multi-hole diesel sprays, the plumes are closely spaced, and the sprays are more likely to interact. The effects of multi-jet interaction on entrainment and spray targeting can be influenced by small variations in the mass fluxes from the holes, which in turn depend on transients in the needle movement and small-scale details of the internal geometry. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of a multi-institutional effort to experimentally characterize the internal geometry and near-nozzle flow of the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) Spray G gasoline injector. In order to develop a complete pictitre of the near-nozzle flow, a standardized setup was shared between facilities. A wide range of techniques were employed, including both X-ray and visible-light diagnostics. The novel aspects of this work include both new experimental measurements, and a comparison of the results across different techniques and facilities. The breadth and depth of the data reveal phenomena which were not apparent from analysis of the individual data sets. We show that plume-to-plume variations in the mass fluxes from the holes can cause large-scale asymmetries in the entrainment field and spray structure. Both internal flow transients and small-scale geometric features can have an effect on the external flow. The sharp turning angle of the flow into the holes also causes an inward vectoring of the plumes relative to the hole drill angle, which increases with time due to entrainment of gas into a low-pressure region between the plumes. These factors increase the likelihood of spray collapse with longer injection durations.

Gasoline direct injection (GDI) nozzles are manufactured to meet geometric specifications with length scales onthe order of a few hundred microns. The machining tolerances of these nominal dimensions are not always knowndue to the difficulty in accurately measuring such small length scales in a nonintrusive fashion. To gain insight intothe variability of the machined dimensions as well as any effects that this variability may have on the fuel spraybehavior, a series of measurements of the internal geometry and fuel mass distribution were performed on a set ofeight nominally duplicate GDI “Spray G” nozzles provided by the Engine Combustion Network. The key dimensionsof each of the eight nozzle holes were measured with micron resolution using full spectrum x-ray tomographicimaging at the 7-BM beamline of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. Fuel densitydistributions at 2 mm downstream of the nozzle tips were obtained by performing x-ray radiography measurementsfor many lines of sight. The density measurements reveal nozzle-to-nozzle as well as hole-to-hole density variations.The combination of high-resolution geometry and fuel distribution datasets allows spray phenomena to be linked tospecific geometric characteristics of the nozzle, such as variability in the hole lengths and counterbore diameters,and the hole inlet corner radii. This analysis provides important insight into which geometrical characteristics ofthe nozzles may have the greatest importance in the development of the injected sprays, and to what degreethese geometric variations might account for the total spray variability. The goal of this work is then to further theunderstanding of the relationship between internal nozzle geometry and fuel injection, provide input to improvecomputational models, and ultimately aid in optimizing injector design for higher fuel efficiency and lower emissionsengines.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/ILASS2017.2017.4766

In the past years the awareness on climate change, air pollution, and fossil fuel availability has been growing, which has pushed the automotive industry to search for new combustion systems as well as for the optimization of the current ones. In this respect, the gasoline engine has much potential for improvement especially in regard to fuel consumption. GDi engines are the natural upgrade of PFI gasoline engines and their use is expected to grow over the years. This paper explores the use of rate of injection (ROI) and rate of momentum (ROM) to characterize the internal flow of an ECN gasoline injector. Rate of momentum has been successfully used in Diesel injectors with this objective and for the first time, the measurements have been made on a GDi injector. The paper focuses on the experimental setup used and the different uncertainties and difficulties to translate the typically measured Diesel techniques to a gasoline injector; it presents the measurements obtained for rate of injection and for the different methodologies used for rate of momentum. The paper also contains internal flow simulations performed with CONVERGE to compare the results with those gathered experimentally; the comparison between the computational simulations and the experimental data resulted in good agreement.

A lot of effort has been put in the past years into the understanding of the delivery and development of diesel sprays in engine-like conditions as it has been proved to be a very important step for the design of better and cleaner commercial engines. Due to the bigger share of passenger cars engines over heavy duty engines, the research has been mainly focused on the investigation using small nozzles. This paper studies two nozzles with diameters representative of those that can be encountered in heavy duty engines, with the objective of corroborating the conclusions gathered for small nozzles representative of passenger car engines. The experimental data have been acquired by state-of-the-art techniques and equipment, and serves two purposes: further the understanding of the physics involved in the injection event and spray evaporation; and provide a dataset to CM models that can accurately predict the behavior of the injection event.The tests were performed in a constant pressure flow vessel that allows to simulate engine-like conditions (1000 K and 15 Mpa) with continuous flow. The injection system tested is a novel, common-rail, solenoid-actuated injector for heavy duty applications which operates up to 220 Mpa. All experiments were performed in non-reacting conditions. The extended test matrix allowed to determine the influence of several parameters such as rail pressure, gas temperature, gas density, and nozzle geometry on the air fuel mixing and evaporation process, by analyzing the spray penetration and spreading angle. Mie scattering and double-pass Schlieren optical configurations have been used to measure global liquid and vapor penetration, respectively.The data proves that spray penetration at low temperature can be up to 15% faster than spray penetration at high temperature conditions at the same density for the nozzles experimented, which limits the usability of low temperature experiments to infer the behavior of the injector at high temperature conditions. The data also shows that the nozzle with the biggest diameter provided the highest value of stabilized liquid length as expected. Also, when vapor phase is reached, the temperature has negligible effect on the global diesel spray morphology, and no influence on the tip penetration or on the spreading angle. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.