Gasoline compression ignition on a light-duty multi-cylinder engine using a wide range of fuel reactivities and heavy fuel stratification

Adam B. Dempsey, Scott Curran, Robert Wagner, William Cannella, Andrew Ickes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Many research studies have focused on utilizing gasoline in modern compression ignition engines to reduce emissions and improve efficiency. Collectively, this combustion mode has become kn+own as gasoline compression ignition (GCI). One of the biggest challenges with GCI operation is maintaining control over the combustion process through the fuel injection strategy, such that the engine can be controlled on a cycle-by-cycle basis. Research studies have investigated a wide variety of GCI injection strategies (i.e., fuel stratification levels) to maintain control over the heat release rate while achieving low-temperature combustion (LTC). This work shows that at loads relevant to light-duty engines, partial fuel stratification (PFS) with gasoline provides very little controllability over the timing of combustion. On the contrary, heavy fuel stratification (HFS) provides very linear and pronounced control over the timing of combustion. However, the HFS strategy has challenges achieving LTC operation due to the air handling burdens associated with the high exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rates that are required to reduce NOx emissions to near zero levels. In this work, a wide variety of gasoline fuel reactivities (octane numbers ranging from <40 to 87) were investigated to understand the engine performance and emissions of HFS-GCI operation on a multi-cylinder light-duty engine. The results indicate that over an EGR sweep at 4 bar brake mean effective pressure (BMEP), the gasoline fuels can achieve LTC operation with ultra-low NOx and soot emissions, while conventional diesel combustion (CDC) is unable to simultaneously achieve low NOx and soot. At 10 bar BMEP, all the gasoline fuels were compared to diesel, but using mixing controlled combustion and not LTC.

Original languageEnglish
Article number092303
JournalJournal of Energy Resources Technology, Transactions of the ASME
Volume143
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2021

Funding

This article has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan.1 This research was supported by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Vehicle Technologies Office, and used resources at the National Transportation Research Center, a DOE-EERE User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The authors would gratefully like to thank the US DOE Vehicle Technologies Office Program Managers Kevin Stork and Gurpreet Singh for the support and guidance for this work.

Keywords

  • Gasoline emissions fuel stratification combustion

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