Multidimensional Modeling of Natural Gas Jet and Mixture Formation in Direct Injection Spark Ignition Engines—Development and Validation of a Virtual Injector Model

During the last few years, the integration of CFD tools in the internal combustion (IC) engine design process has continually increased, allowing time and cost savings as the need for experimental prototypes has diminished. Numerical analyses of IC engine flows are rather complex from both the conceptual and operational sides. In fact, these flows involve a variety of unsteady phenomena and the right balance between numerical solution accuracy and computational cost should always be reached. The present paper is focused on computational modeling of natural gas (NG) direct injection (DI) processes from a poppet-valve injector into a bowl-shaped combustion chamber. At high injection pressures, the gas efflux from the injector and the mixture formation processes include turbulent and compressible flow features, such as rarefaction waves and shock formation, which are difficult to accurately capture with numerical simulations, particularly when the combustion chamber geometry is complex and the piston and intake/exhaust valve grids are moving. In this paper, a three-dimensional moving grid model of the combustion engine chamber, originally developed by the authors to include simulation of the actual needle lift, has been enhanced by increasing the accuracy in the proximity of the sonic section of the critical valve-seat nozzle, in order to precisely capture the expansion dynamics the methane undergoes inside the injector and immediately downstream from it. The enhanced numerical model was then validated by comparing the numerical results to Schlieren experimental images for gas injection into a constant-volume bomb. Numerical studies were carried out in order to characterize the fuel-jet properties and the evolution of mixture formation for a centrally mounted injector configuration in the case of a pancake-shaped test chamber and the real engine chamber. Finally, the fluid properties calculated by the model in the throat section of the critical nozzle were taken as reference data for developing a new effective virtual injector model, which allows the designer to remove the whole computational domain upstream from the sonic section of the nozzle, keeping the flow properties virtually unchanged there. The virtual injector model outcomes were shown to be in very good agreement with the results of the enhanced complete injector model, substantiating the reliability of the proposed novel approach.