Numerical Investigation of the Effect of Incorporated Guide Vane Length with SCC Piston for High-Viscosity Fuel Applications

Abstract

Compression ignition (CI) engines that run on high-viscosity fuels (HVF) like emulsified biofuels generally demonstrate poor engine performance. An engine with a consistently low performance, in the long run, will have a negative effect on its lifespan. Poor combustion in engines occurs mainly due to the production of less volatile, less flammable, denser, and heavier molecules of HVF during injection. This paper proposes a guide vane design (GVD) to be installed at the intake manifold, which is incorporated with a shallow depth re-entrance combustion chamber (SCC) piston. This minor modification will be advantageous in improving the evaporation, diffusion, and combustion processes in the engine to further enhance its performance. The CAD models of the GVD and SCC piston were designed using SolidWorks 2018 while the flow run analysis of the cold flow CI engine was conducted using ANSYS Fluent Version 15. In this study, five designs of the GVD with varying lengths of the vanes from 0.6D (L) to 3.0D (L) were numerically evaluated. The GVD design with 0.6D (L) demonstrated improved turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) as well as swirl (R_s), tumble (R_T), and cross tumble (R_CT) ratios in the fuel-injected zone compared to other designs. The suggested improvements in the design would enhance the in-cylinder airflow characteristics and would be able to break up the penetration length of injection to mix in the wider area of the piston-bowl.