What is it about?

How to understand the energy flow between a prechamber and a main chamber in an engine? Usually, the only experimentally accessible quantities are the pressures in both chambers. This paper describes how to derive pressure trace based heat release rates and enthalpy flows as well as how to estimate mass and temperature in a prechamber.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Future renewable fuels for the heavy-duty and maritime segments differ considerably from classical fuels in many ways. Often, they are hard to ignite (as for example methane, ammonia) or need a lot of air excess or exhaust gas recirculations for several reasons (as for example hydrogen). One way of robust ignition is to use a non-fueled (passive) or a fueled (active) prechamber, which creates intense, turbulent jets to robustly ignite the charge in the main chamber. Understanding the thermodynamic processes for such prechamber systems is key for finding the right parameters (e.g. geometrical details of the prechamber, injection and ignition phasing). This paper describes a method which gives the researcher looking at recorded data, or the engineer calbrating engine settings on a test bench a tool to interpret the processes in a comparably simple and quick way.

Perspectives

Michelangelo, a PhD student in his last year, did a great job developing a model and validating it against very different sources of data - from detailed CFD "experiments", over data from an optical prechamber to a running full metal engine, equipped with interchangeable prechambers. I hope this approach will be valuable for several future activities in different groups. Moreover, this approach has the potential to be integrated in real-time or close-to-real-time applications which opens-up new ways for optimization or even for feedback control.

Dr.sc.techn. ETH Patrik Soltic
Empa

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Method for pressure trace based thermodynamic analysis of pre-chamber combustion, Energy Conversion and Management, July 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.enconman.2024.118561.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page