Towards Clean Diesel Engines - 4th Symposium June 5th and 6th 2003 - Eindhoven University of Technology

3D Modelling1 of Diesel and HCCI Engine Combustion

C. Angelberger, A. Pires da Cruz, A. Benkenida, M. Miche, V. Knop The growing interest for new combustion modes like the Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion in Diesel engines sets new challenges for 3D CFD model developers. The first reason for this is the fact that HCCI injection strategies cover a much broader range of injection phasing, fuel quantities, cone angles and pressures than can be found in standard Diesel engines. In some cases, important wall wetting may be observed and needs to be described to accurately predict mixture formation, combustion and pollutants. The present speech essentially deals with the other modelling challenge for new Diesel combustion modes: the increasing importance of chemistry effects, and in particular the need to accurately predict auto-ignition in a turbulent flow over a large range of thermodynamic conditions. For standard Diesel modes, fuel is mostly injected late in the engine cycle, at instants where the pressure and temperature levels are high. Under these conditions only the high temperature branch of the complex chemical kinetics of hydrocarbon fuels needs to be considered to predict auto-ignition delays. To first order auto-ignition delay can in these cases be considered to be inversely proportional to the logarithm of temperature, without the need to solve for all the details of high temperature kinetics. These simple approaches are generally all the more justified for standard Diesel modes, where the the very small auto-ignition delays mostly depend on mixture formation. In contrast, for HCCI modes the low temperature branch of hydrocarbon kinetics has also to be taken into account to be able to predict auto-ignition delays. This is due to the fact that fuel injection may occur much earlier in the engine cycle than for standard modes, at levels of pressure and temperature where these kinetics are competing those of the high temperature branch. Thus, predicting auto-ignition delays necessitates to include more details of the hydrocarbon kinetics into the modelling, and in particular to take into account the Negative Temperature Coefficient (NTC) region, where ignition delays become shorter the lower the temperature. In the context of 3D CFD modelling the difficulty arises then from the fact that the complexity of hydrocarbon high and low temperature kinetics has to be addressed in combination with an accurate description of turbulent mixing. The time scales for kinetics and mixing are comparable during the long ignition phase in HCCI operation. Some standard 3D CFD modelling approaches for Diesel combustion are presented and their application to HCCI discussed. In particular we present in detail the modelling approach chosen by IFP: the ECFM3z model for engine combustion. ECFM3z is a turbulent combustion model including all aspects of engine combustion: auto-ignition, premixed spark ignited combustion, diffusion combustion and any of their combination. To achieve this, combustion is modelled in a two dimensional c-Z space, with c the mean progress variable and Z a mixture fraction. The structure in Z is simplified by considering only 3 zones. The first represents the unmixed gaseous fuel resulting from liquid injection. The second represents the unmixed air and EGR. Finally the third zone results from the mixing of the two
1 Note that modelling with two lls is NOT an error but the standard English (UK) orthography!! So please leave it like this.

preceding zones: it is there that auto-ignition and combustion may occur. This approach allows to describe the coupling between turbulent mixing and ignition/combustion/pollutants using different levels of complexity. In its simplest form, ECFM3z assumes the mixed zone to be perfectly mixed, neglecting small scale fluctuations and scalar dissipation effects. The description of auto-ignition is limited to the prediction of the auto-ignition delay using a simple Arrhenius type correlation. Heat release during auto-ignition is neglected, while main combustion heat release is modelled using a standard Magnussen type approach based on the turbulent mixing time. Pollutants are computed using classical reduced kinetics for NOx and soot. This approach proved to be well adapted to standard Diesel applications, but failed to address some phenomena characteristic of HCCI combustion. In order to extend ECFM3z to HCCI combustion, the main effort was to account for the effects of low temperature chemistry during ignition, while keeping the CPU demand low. Two options were explored and are presented. The first consisted of directly using reduced kinetic schemes to compute the heat release during the whole cycle, corrected with a turbulent time scale to account for small scale stratification and scalar dissipation effects. Although work on reduced schemes for HCCI combustion of higher hydrocarbons is constantly progressing, this approach proved to be too CPU time expensive for the moment. Thus, a second modelling approach consisted in reducing the auto-ignition chemistry to its first order effects, namely the existence of an auto-ignition delay depending in a complex way on local thermodynamic conditions, and the heat release during the cool flame stage (corresponding to the NTC region). This information was extracted from a number of 0D simulations of auto-ignition using detailed kinetic schemes. It was then included into the ECFM3z model via a computationally very inexpensive tabulation. The resulting reproduction of the physics of HCCI auto-ignition proved to be satisfactory, with negligible computational overhead as compared to methods making direct use of chemical kinetics. Finally, possible extensions of the ECFM3z methodology to account for small scale stratification and scalar dissipation effects are outlined. Some applications of the ECFM3z model to standard and HCCI Diesel combustion are presented. A first case concerns the computation of standard Diesel engines, showing how 3D CFD can be used to e.g. optimise the combustion chamber shape. A second application illustrates the qualitative reproduction of the effect of post-injection on the soot levels in a truck engine. A simple test case is used to illustrate the importance an accurate description of the cool flame stage may have under certain HCCI operations. To conclude, we show the accuracy of the ECFM3z model when computing HCCI engines by comparing simulations of ignition and combustion in an HCCI engine running the NADITM concept with experimental findings.