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Gasoline Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) was investigated in a single cylinder optical diesel engine. The PPC operation was achieved with a combination of high dilution and higher intake charge temperature at part-load conditions using Primary Reference Fuel (PRF). The relative air/fuel ratio (λ) was set to 2.3 and the EGR rate at 22%. Split injections of three fuel distribution strategies (50:50, 70:30 and 30:70) were studied. In addition, the effect of injection pressure (900 and 1200 bar) was investigated for each injection timing. The emission and performance of the gasoline PPC operations were then compared with those of the baseline diesel combustion operation. Based on the thermodynamic analysis of the engine performance, detailed in-cylinder studies were carried out by means of optical techniques. The high speed imaging technique was employed to observe the fuel spray development and combustion processes. A simultaneous Mie-LIF technique was then developed and utilized for the visualization of fuel liquid and vapour formation.

The work was concerned with experimental study of the turbulent flame development process of alcohol fuels, namely ethanol and butanol, in an optically accessed spark ignition research engine. The fuels were evaluated in a single cylinder engine equipped with full-bore overhead optical access operated at typical stoichiometric part-load conditions with images captured using high-speed natural light imaging techniques (or chemiluminescence). The differences in flame development between the fuels was analysed to understand better the impact of high and low alcohol content fuels on combustion. Advanced image analysis, in conjunction with Ricardo WAVE simulation, allowed for the conclusion that the faster burning exhibited by ethanol was the result of the marginally higher laminar burning velocity providing a faster laminar burn phase and accelerating the flame into the turbulent spectrum thus reducing bulk flame distortion and better in-cylinder pressure development. Such physical reactions are often over-looked in the face of chemical differences between fuels. A further study into the variation of maximum in-cylinder pressure values was conducted focussing on iso-octane and ethanol. This study identified two phenomena, namely “saw-toothing” and “creep” in which cluster of cycles feed into one another. From this it became clear that the presence of high pressure during the exhaust process had a large influence on the following cycles. This is another often overlooked phenomenon of direct cycle-to-cycle variation whereby incylinder pressures during blowdown can dictate the duration, load or stability output of the following cycle. Finally the work investigated the impact on flame development of alcohol fuels when the overlap duration was altered. While the engine produced counterintuitive figures of residual gas, ethanol was confirmed as having greater synergy with EGR by displaying less impacted combustion durations c.f. iso-octane. Care should be taken however when analysing these results due to the unique valve configuration of the engine.

Combustion monitoring in internal combustion engine or burners is a difficult task due to the harsh environment for any sensor, therefore optical diagnostics are very attractive for these types of application. Chemiluminescence measurement is one of the most common and most promising ways of implementing optical diagnostics in combustion monitoring applications because the measured signal, emitted naturally with combustion, has potential to be an indirect measure of combustion relevant parameters, such as the equivalence ratio and heat release rate. In hydrocarbon combustion, the most common chemiluminescence emitters are OH*, CH*, C₂* and CO₂*. This thesis focuses on the measurement of OH* and CH* chemiluminescence, whose sensitivities are affected by temperature, pressure, equivalence ratio and stretch rate. To measure OH* and CH* chemiluminescence, an existing constant volume combustion vessel has been refurbished, along with the sub-systems for fuel delivery, ignition, LabView control, data acquisition, and optical detection using a pair of photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs), interference filters and a series of apertures. Modelling accurately the optical setup is essential for the CH* and OH* chemiluminescence measurements in the combustion bomb. To achieve this goal, a narrow field of view system has been selected as it enables the elimination of photons scattered from the internal surfaces. A calibration of the PMTs converts the measurements into the absolute OH* and CH* chemiluminescence in terms of watt. Measurements from a combustion bomb are versatile and accurate since it determines the OH* and CH* chemiluminescence as a function of temperature and pressure from a single experiment. The calculation of the normalised OH* and CH* chemiluminescence (against mass burned rate) was based on a multi-zone combustion model and measured pressure record from the vessel. NIICS (Normalised Intensity Integrated Calculation System) has been created to fetch data from the multi-zone model, the optical model, and experimental measurements, to match them up by interpolation and to normalise the OH* and CH* chemiluminescence. NIICS also allows the user to select data uncorrupted by the noise and heat transfer. The chosen data (in this case, CH*/OH* chemiluminescence ratio) have been fitted using a multi-variate fitting and correlation analysis. This formulation can be used to indicate the local equivalence ratio from premixed methane / air and iso-octane / air flames over the local pressure range 0.5 – 20 bar, the unburned gas temperature range 450 – 600 K, and equivalence ratio range 0.8 – 1.1. The chemical-kinetic mechanisms of the absolute OH* and CH* chemiluminescence have been investigated by studying the influence of the equivalence ratio, unburned gas temperature, and local pressure. It should be pointed out that two confounding observations occur, i.e. a discontinuity in the chemiluminescence along the isentropes, and chemiluminescence continuing after the end of combustion. This led to the further spectroscopic analysis. This study concluded with spectroscopic measurements using an Ocean Optics spectrometer and a Princeton ICCD spectrometer. It was found that the broadband CO₂* is responsible for the two disconcerting observations. In addition, CH* chemiluminescence has been shown to be very faint from premixed laminar methane / air flames; hence the CH*/OH* formula in essence quantifies the CO₂*/OH* ratio as a function of pressure, temperature, and equivalence ratio. The ‘CH* chemiluminescence’ can characterise the background CO₂*, so as to provide a practical way to probe the feasibility of absolute OH* as an indicator of combustion relevant parameters in the future.

Petrol internal combustion engines (ICEs) in automobiles use a high-voltage spark ignition system, which currently offers an energy efficiency of 25%-35% only and also produces excessive exhaust emissions. Recent political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental drive has accelerated the worldwide research in ‘greener’ engines, such as the homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engines, which focuses on total resource conservation and emission reduction per mile. However, its ignition timing needs real-time control of cylinder pressure and temperature in a closed loop, which is practically intractable to date. Leapfrogging HCCI and requiring no closed-loop control or modification to the engine, this thesis develops homogenous charge microwave ignition (HCMI) directly to replace the point-based spark ignition. Like HCCI, HCMI is volume based and is also applicable to diesel fuel. Through computer simulations, the thesis verifies the feasibility of the ICE radio frequency ignition concept first proposed by Ward in 1974. Building on the simulation-based design methodology of Boeing 777 aircraft, which required no hardware casting or prototyping at the design stage, this thesis employs intelligent search to evolve ‘designs of experiments’ by simulation means for vehicle-borne HCMI with potential to offer a step change in fuel efficiency and emission reduction. Investigation of this thesis into the effect of piston position confirms with graphical visualisation that the resonant frequency of the engine cylinder is very sensitive to the piston motion, because it can easily cause off-resonance and hence degraded field strength. It is revealed that this is the major factor that encumbers practical realisation of an HCMI system. This thesis shows that the natural frequency changes 0.015 GHz per 0.5 mm in average when the piston moves from 5 mm to 0.5 mm TDC and 0.0021 GHz per 0.05 mm when the piston moves from 0.5 mm to 0.05 mm to TDC. For the geometry of the given ICE cylinder, if the input microwave frequency is fixed, the resonance lasts for 7 s. Investigation on various diameters of cylinders that reveals the results on the effects of piston motion of a certain cylinder can be extended to other cylinders with different diameters. It is also shown that for different types of cylinders the frequency of input microwave can be very different. Therefore, the different microwave source of the HCMI systems has to be designed for different types of vehicles. Simulations reported in the thesis also reveal that a microwave based ignition takes 30 ns to 100 ns to break down the median of a permittivity and permeability that are the same as the chemically optimal 14.7:1 air-fuel mixture. This is much shorter than the duration of the microwave resonance and hence makes HCMI feasible in terms of duration. For a running engine, the variations of AFR can also cause off-resonance. It is found that the AFR does not affect the resonant frequency as much as piston motion does. The frequency only changes 38MHz when the AFR varies from 10:1 to 16:1. Properties and effects of microwave emitter and couplers are also studied and the results confirm with graphical visualisation that, for an emitter in the form of a probe antenna, the electric field intensity is dependant on the antenna length. For the given geometry of the Chryslor-Dorge ICE studied, a probe antenna of a length around 30% of wavelength shorter than the end of transmission line offers the best coupling efficiency in an HCMI system. To search for globally optimal designs, the Nelder-Mead simplex method and the ‘intelligent’ evolutionary algorithm (EA) are coupled with CAD simulations. These machine learning methods are shown efficient and reliable in dealing with multiple parameters. Under practical constraints, the best ignition timing and AFR combination is found, which for a 100 W input offers an electric field intensity of up to 9.8×106 V m-1, almost doubling the minimum requirement of 5.5×106 V m-1 for a plasma breakdown of the air-fuel mixture. In this work, six different geometric shapes of antennae are studied. Through the EA based global search, it is confirmed that the length and screen radius of the probe antenna do not affect the resonant frequency significantly. For the given ICE geometry, an antenna length of 14.3 mm offers the best efficiency and the least reflection regardless of the screen radius. The radius affects resonance the least among all the parameters searched, although it can contribute to enhancing electric field and reducing reflection of the coupling. For maximal electric field strength in the cylinder, the best combination of the antenna length and the screen radius is also searched and results are fully tabulated in this thesis.

Full-coverage or effusion cooling is commonly used in the thermal management of gas turbine combustion systems. The combustor environment is characterised by highly turbulent free-stream conditions and relatively large turbulent length scales. This turbulent flow field is predominantly created by the upstream fuel injector for lean burn systems. In rich burn systems the turbulent flow field is augmented further by the addition of dilution ports. The available evidence suggests that large energetic eddies interact strongly with the injected coolant fluid and may have a significant impact on the film-cooling performance. The desire to create compact low-emission combustion systems with improved specific fuel consumption, has given rise to a desire to reduce the quantity of air used in wall cooling, and has led to the need for improved cooling correlations and validated computational methods. In order to establish a greater understanding of effusion cooling under conditions of very high free-stream turbulence, a new laboratory test facility has been created that is capable of simulating representative combustor flow conditions, and that allows for a systematic investigation of cooling performance over a range of free-stream turbulence conditions (up to 25% intensity, integral length scale-to-coolant hole diameter ratios of 26) and coolant to mainstream density ratios (??_c/??_??? ???2). This thesis describes this new test facility, including the method for generating combustor relevant flow conditions. The hot side film cooling performance of cylindrical and fanned hole effusion has been evaluated in terms of adiabatic film-cooling effectiveness and normalised heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and heat flux reduction (HFR). Infrared thermography was employed to produce spatial resolved surface temperature distributions of the effusion surface. The analysis of this data is supported by fluid temperature field measurements. The interpretation of the data has established the impact of turbulence intensity, integral length scale and density ratio on the mixing processes between free-stream and coolant flows. Elevated levels of free-stream turbulence increase the rate of mixing and degrade the cooling effectiveness at low blowing ratios whereas at high blowing ratios, where the coolant detaches from the surface, a modest increase has been observed under certain conditions; this is due to the turbulent transport of the detached coolant fluid back towards the wall. For angled cylindrical hole injection the impact of density ratio as an independent parameter was found to be relatively weak. Adiabatic effectiveness data gathered at DR's of 1 - 1.4 scaled reasonable well when plotted against momentum flux ratio. This suggests data collected at low DR's can be scaled to engine representative DR's. The investigation of shaped cooling holes found fanned effusion has the potential to dramatically improve film effectiveness. The diffusion of the flow through a fanned exit prevented jet detachment at blowing ratios up to 5, increasing spatially averaged effectiveness by 89%.

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As the legislation on vehicle emissions is becoming more and more stringent, increasing attention has been paid to the fine particles emitted by diesel and gasoline vehicles. The high number emission of fine particles has been shown to have a large impact on the atmospheric environment and human health. Researchers have shown that gasoline engines, especially Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines, tend to emit large amounts of small size particles compared to Port Fuel Injection (PFI) gasoline engines and diesel engines fitted with Diesel Particulate Filters (DPFs). As a result, the particle number emissions of GDI engines will be restricted by the EU6 legislation. The particulate emission level of GDI engines means that they would face some challenges in meeting the EU6 requirement. This thesis undertakes research in the following area. Firstly, the filtration efficiencies of glass fibre filters were quantified using a Cambustion Differential Mobility Spectrometer 500 (DMS500) to see if all of the particles from the sampled gas can be collected by the filters. Secondly, various valve timings and different injection modes such as double injection with a second injection after compression, single early injection and split early injection were implemented to measure the Particulate Matter (PM) emissions and combustion characteristics of a GDI engine under warm-up operating conditions. Thirdly, the techniques for removing volatile particles were investigated using a catalytic Volatile Particle Remover (VPR) and an Evaporation Tube (ET) with hot air dilution under various test conditions. The results show that for the glass fibre filters tested here, the transmission efficiencies of the particles are very low, indicating that PM sampling using fibre filters is an effective method of studying the particulate emissions from the engine. Particle number emissions using double injection with injection after compression were much higher than those with single injection during the intake stroke. Under 1200 rpm, 110 Nm cold engine operation, no reduction effect on PM emissions was shown by using split intake injection to further facilitate homogeneous mixture formation compared with single intake injection. Valve timings showed moderate effects on particulate emissions. Properly adjusted timing for exhaust valve closure led to reduced particulate emissions by a factor of about 2 and the combustion characteristics were not adversely affected much. The VPR temperature and exhaust residence time did not show much effect on the catalytic VPR performance once the mass flow rate of exhaust was above 0.09 g/s. Generally, the transmission efficiencies of the VPR follow the trends of the scaled PMP counting efficiency specification. Hot air dilution is effective in reducing the small size particles. At 23 nm, the transmission efficiencies are within the error range of the PMP specification. The catalytic VPR and the Evaporation Tube were all found to be effective in reducing the particle number of small size (nucleation mode) particles. Both systems have some particle loss mainly due to the physical effects of diffusion and thermophoresis. Until now, GDI engines have not been optimised for reducing particulate emissions as the focus has been on gaseous emissions and fuel economy. With careful re-optimisation of the catalyst light-off and engine calibration (especially for transients) then there is scope for GDI engines to meet forthcoming emissions legislation.

Modern spark ignition engines are downsized and boosted to meet stringent emission standards and growing customer demands on performance and fuel economy. They operate under high intake pressures and close to their limits to engine knock. As the intake pressure is increased knock becomes the major barrier that prevents further improvement on downsized boosted spark ignition engines. It is generally accepted that knock is caused by end gas autoignition ahead of the propagating flame. The propagating flame front has been identified as one of the most influential factors that promote the occurrence of autoignition. Systematic understanding and numerical relation between the propagating flame front and the occurrence of knock are still lacking. Additionally, knock mitigation strategy that minimizes compromise on engine performance needs further researching. Therefore the objectives of the current research consist of two steps: 1). study of turbulent flame propagation in both naturally aspirated SI engine. 2) study of the relationship between flame propagation and the occurrence of engine knock for downsized and boosted SI engine. The aim of the current research is, firstly, to find out how turbulent flames propagate in naturally aspirated and boosted S.I. engines, and their interaction with the occurrence of knock; secondly, to develop a mitigation method that depresses knock intensity at higher intake pressure. Autoignition of hydrocarbon fuels as used in spark ignition engines is a complex chemical process involving large numbers of intermediate species and elementary reactions. Chemical kinetics models have been widely used to study combustion and autoignition of hydrocarbon fuels. Zero-dimensional multi-zone models provide an optimal compromise between computational accuracy and costs for engine simulation. Integration of reduced chemical kinetics model and zero-dimensional three-zone engine model is potentially a effective and efficient method to investigate the physical, chemical, thermodynamic and fluid dynamic processes involved in in-cylinder turbulence flame propagation and knock. The major contributions of the current work are made to new knowledge of quantitative relations between intake pressure, turbulent flame speed, and knock onset timing and intensity. Additionally, contributions have also been made to the development of a knock mitigation strategy that effectively depresses knock intensity under higher intake pressure while minimizes the compromise on cylinder pressure, which can be directive to future engine design.