Effects of operating conditions, compression ratio, and gasoline reformate on SI engine knock limits

A set of experiments was performed to investigate the effects of air-fuel ratio, inlet boost pressure, hydrogen rich fuel reformate, and compression ratio on engine knock behavior. For each condition the effect of spark timing on torque output was measured. Knock limited spark advance was then found for a range of octane number (ON) for each of three fuel types; primary reference fuels (PRFs), toluene reference fuels (TRFs), and test gasolines. A new combustion phasing parameter based on the timing of 50% mass fraction burned, ternled "combustion retard", was found to correlate well to engine performance. Increasing air- fuel ratio increases the combustion retard required to just avoid knock for PRFs and has little effect for TRFs. Combustion retard also increases more with inlet pressure and decreases more with reformate addition for PRFs than for TRFs. Both fuel types responded similarly to increased compression ratio. The trends for gasoline are about halfway between PRFs and TRFs. Experiments were also performed to determine the response of mid-load indicated efficiency to air-fuel ratio, load, and compression ratio. At a compression ratio of 9.8:1, relative net efficiency improvement is about 2.5% per unit compression ratio. Efficiency peaks at about 14:1 with a maximum benefit of 6-7%. Detailed chemical kinetics were combined with a cylinder pressure based end-gas modeling methodology to successfully predicted the response of PRFs to compression ratio and air-fuel ratio, and the response of TRFs to boost. The difference between the response of PRFs and TRFs to air-fuel ratio was also captured.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Gerty, Michael D

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John B. Heywood.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32369

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32369