No description available.

No description available.

The main focus of the work reported here is in the design of an intelligent condition monitoring system for diesel engines. Mechanical systems in general and diesel engines in particular can develop faults if operated for any length of time. Condition monitoring is a method by which the performance of a diesel engine can be maintained at a high level, ensuring both continuous availability and design-level efficiency. A key element in a condition monitoring program is to acquire sensor information from the engine, and use this information to assess the condition of the engine, with an emphasis on monitoring causes of engine failure or reduced efficiency. A Ford 70PS 4-stroke diesel engine has been instrumented with a range of sensors and interfaced to a PC in order to facilitate computer controlled data acquisition and data storage. Data was analyzed to evaluate the optimum use of sensors to identify faults and to develop an intelligent algorithm for the engine condition monitoring and fault detection, and in particular faults affecting the combustion process in the engine. In order to investigate the fault-symptom relationships, two synthetic faults were introduced to the engine. Fuel and inlet air shortage were selected as the faults for their direct relationship to the combustion process quality. As a subtask the manually operated hydraulic brake was adapted to allow automatic control to improve its performance. Two modes of controlling were designed for the developed automatic control of the hydraulic brake system. A robust mathematical diesel engine model has been developed which can be used to predict the engine parameters related to the combustion process in the diesel engine, was constructed from the basic relationships of the diesel engine using the minimum number of empirical equations. The system equations of a single cylinder engine were initially developed, from which the multi-cylinder diesel engine model was validated against experimental test data. The model was then tuned to improve the predicted engine parameters for better matching with the available engine type. The final four-cylinder diesel engine model was verified and the results show an accurate match with the experimental results. Neural networks and fuzzification were used to develop and validate the intelligent condition monitoring and fault diagnosis algorithm, in order to satisfy the requirements of on-line operation, i. e. reliability, easily trained, minimum hardware and software requirements. The development process used a number of different neural network architecture and training techniques. To increase the number of the parameters used for the engine condition evaluation, the Multi-Net technique was used to satisfy accurate and fast decision making. Two neural networks are designed to operate in parallel to accommodate the different sampling rate of the key parameters without interference and with reduced data processing time. The two neural networks were trained and validated using part of the measured data set that represents the engine operating range. Another set of data, not utilized within the training stage, has been applied for validation. The results of validation process indicate the successful prediction of the faults using the key measured parameters, as well as a fast data processing algorithm. One of the main outcomes of this study is the development of a new technique to measure cylinder pressure and fuel pressure through the measurement of the strain in the injector body. The main advantage of this technique is that, it does not require any intrusive modification to the engine which might affect the engine actual performance. The developed sensor was tested and used to measure the cylinder and fuel pressure to verify the fuel fault effect on the combustion process quality. Due to high sampling rate required, the developed condition monitoring and fault diagnosis algorithm does not utilize this signal to reduce the required computational resources for practical applications.

The diesel engine combustion process produces carbonaceous deposits known as soot. Such carbonaceous deposits are accumulated at critical locations in a diesel engine, with detrimental effect on engine performance. The main objective of this project is to explore the role of polymers and additives, on the stability of carbon black, soot model, in organic solvents. Lubrizol uses a wide range of polyolefin derivatives, such as polar head groups grafted onto saturated polymers, as lubricants in diesel engine oil. A new generation of additive, known as a Dispersant Viscosity Modifier, that has dual functional properties in a single molecule, has been synthesised. The additive can be used for both dispersancy and viscosity modification. It is composed of a long hydrocarbon chain and a polar head group.

The demand for the protection of the environment from air pollution and reduction of carbon dioxide has resulted in worldwide exhaust emissions regulations imposed on the diesel engines. Fortunately, diesel engine offers the best fuel economy and low emissions of carbon dioxide of most engines currently available. However, the engine's inherent drawbacks are that the engine is heavy, noisy, and expensive, in addition to producing significant level of particulates and nitrogen oxides emissions. The present research attempts to understand the combustion characteristics and emissions trade-off by experimental investigations of the diesel engine using a production Lister Petter 2.97 litres, four-cylinder, high-speed, direct injection diesel engine. The investigation involved the analysis of the in-cylinder pressure data, heat release rate calculation and exhaust gas measurements of various injectors having different nozzle geometry. The engine experiments cover both the investigation of the fuel injection and the engine operating parameters such as injection rate, nozzle geometry, the engine load and speed. The effects of each parameter on ignition delay, heat release rate, nitrogen oxides emissions, smoke density, and total hydrocarbon levels were investigated. Two complementary diagnostic techniques were employed in order to assist in understanding the injection characteristics. The first technique involved the imaging of the fuel sprays from the different injectors in a constant volume spray chamber using a CCD camera. The images were than process using a dedicated image processing software. The second technique involved the measurements of the fuel injection rates from the injectors using the Bosch Tube meter. A three-zone model was developed to determine the heat release rate of combustion. The cylinder pressure data was used to validate the model written in Matlab computer programme. The model is based on the principles of the First Law of Thermodynamics applied to the three zones, formed due to the fuel injection into the combustion chamber. The heat release rate profiles produced by the model were used to analyse the formation of pollutants that were measured in the exhaust gas. The results showed that injectors with large nozzle hole diameters produced high smoke levels, especially at high engine load conditions with small increase in NOx. These injectors also caused the sprays to impinged on the combustion chamber walls at high load conditions. On the other hand, injectors having small nozzle hole diameters produced high levels of NOx while the smoke emission levels were low. The effect of nozzle geometry has little significant on the emissions of THC.

No description available.

The development and combusting behaviour of a diesel spray were investigated to provide a deeper understanding of the formation of nitric oxide (NO) in diesel engines. To characterise the spray, the nozzle flow was measured by the rate tube technique. The sensitivity of the flow to injection pressure was shown to follow the theoretical behaviour. Penetrations of the liquid spray were measured by means of high speed video imaging. The innovative measurements of the liquid penetration during the combustion allowed combustion phases and liquid jet lengths to be associated. Hydroxyl (OH) radicals were acquired by planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF). Combined with high speed videos of the flame natural luminosity, they were used to identify precisely the evolution of combustion in time and space. The measured OH distributions compared favourably with results from simulations using the KIVA code. The OH radicals were shown to be present mainly in the mixing controlled phase, distributed in a thin layer around the vapour fuel in the jet, within the diffusion flame location. OH radicals could be seen as early as 0.4 ms before the pre-mixed heat-release spike and until the end of apparent heat release. In the conditions studied, the diffusion flame, therefore, spanned most of the combustion process, starting very soon after autoignition. Finally distributions of NO were acquired by LIF and compared with the evolution of combustion. NO was found to appear 0.5 to 1 ms after the development of the diffusion flame, on the lean side of the flame front, outside the region with a high density of OH radicals but also later on, downstream the spray, on the outskirts of the zone with high soot density. The formation rate of NO was found almost constant during the mixing controlled combustion, with a small increase at the end of injection, when the flame collapsed on the fuel spray. The observed increase was linked to a rapid cooling of the flame plume and the associated freezing of the thermal-NO mechanism. Varying injection pressures did not significantly affect the overall formation rate although peak NO densities were seen to gradually move downstream the flame plume with increased injection pressure. NO formation increased with the in-cylinder pressure in accordance with a higher density of air and higher local temperatures.

The recent advances in Fuel Injection Equipment (FIE) have led to the identification of deposits found in the fuel filters and injector equipment. The work carried out here identifies the effects of cavitating flows on the physical and chemical properties of diesel fuel in order to try to evaluate the mechanism for deposit formation in FIE equipment using optical techniques to characterise the cavitating flows. Two sets of experiments have been carried out in order to understand the impact of cavitating flow on diesel fuels. The first experiment investigated the effects of sustained cavitating flow using a fuel recirculation rig. Samples of commercial diesel were subjected to forty hours of intense cavitating flow across a diesel injector in a specially designed high-pressure recirculation flow rig. Changes to the optical absorption and scattering properties of the diesel over time were identified by the continuous measurement of spectral attenuation coefficients at 405 nm by means of a simple optical arrangement. Identical diesel samples ~ere maintained at 70°C for forty hours in a heated water bath, in order to distinguish the effects of hydrodynamic cavitation and the regulated temperature on the cavitated diesel samples. The commercial diesel samples subjected to high pressure cavitating flow and heat tests revealed a response to the flow and temperature history that was identified by an increase in the optical attenuation coefficients of the cavitated and heated samples. The contribution of cavitating flow and temperature to the variation in spectral attenuation coefficient was identified. It was hypothesised that the increases observed in the spectral attenuation coefficients of the cavitated commercial diesels were caused by the cavitation affecting the aromatics in the commercial diesel . samples. The fuels were sent for a GC x GC and particle count analysis and results show significant increase in particle number count in the fuels as a result of cavitating flow. An increase in particle count to such high magnitudes was not observed for the heat test samples. Qualitative chemical modelling results of the pyrolysis of fuel vapour cavities during collapse at high pressures and temperatures have shown possible pathways leading to the formation of particulates. The presence of aromatics in diesel fuel was considered to be key species to the formulation of soot particles, however at extreme pressures and temperature paraffins may also have the propensity to breakdown into aromatics and further on to the formation of soot particles as observed by the pathway analysis in the modelling in the appendix. The second study undertaken involved the analysis of the near nozzle external spray dropsizing and atomisation characteristics of fuels with different distillation profiles using LIF-MIE image ratios. The LIF -Mie image ratios were simultaneously captured synchronously with the internal nozzle hole cavitating flow. Internal nozzle flow and sac observations after needle return have led to the conclusions that flow angular momentum is sustained in the sac flow after needle return. This flow was observed to have a high angular momentum which reduced over time. During the end of needle return, bubbles were observed in the sac hole forming as a result of needle cavitation. These bubbles retained the angular momentum of the flow post injection (after needle seal). The vortical motion in the sac lead to regions of high and low pressures in the sac volume and thus resulted in suction and discharge of bubble in the nozzle holes. The bubbles may have a high propensity of containing a mixture of fuel and air vapour whereas the suction and discharge offers a pathway to external gases entering the nozzle holes and sac volume. For operating engine conditions this would be post-combustion exhaust gases re-entering the nozzle holes. The combination of the bubble formation, its vOI1Ical motion due to the angular momentum of the liquid flow, its composition and high temperature, may form ideal conditions for pyrolysis like reactions which may lead to the formation of soot particles and deposits in the nozzle hole, sac and needle. Fuels with different distillation profiles were investigated to observe their external drop sizing distributions at 350 bar injection pressure. Results showed that fuels with lighter fractional compositions which also had lower viscosity produced lower Sauter Mean Diameter (SMD) distributions than fuels with higher distillation fractions and higher viscosity. Whether this is as a consequence of the distillation profile alone and is not influenced by the viscosity differences has not been investigated yet and would form the basis of further investigations and publications.

In order to improve understanding of diesel soot oxidation, an experimental rig was designed and set up, in which the soot oxidation conditions, such as temperature, oxygen partial pressure, and CO2 partial pressure, could be varied independently of each other. The oxidizing gas flow in the oxidizer was under laminar condition. This test rig comprised a naturally-aspirated single cylinder engine which acted as the soot generator, and a separate premixed oxidation burner system in which soot extracted from the engine was oxidized under controlled conditions. Diesel soot was extracted from the engine exhaust pipe and from the engine pre-combustion chamber, and the soot-laden gas was then conveyed to the burner where it was oxidized. The burner was positioned vertically and it had a flat flame whose thickness was only a few millimetres. The hot gases from the flame flew upwards through a quartz transparent tube which acted as the soot oxidation duct. The soot-laden gas from the engine was premixed with the feedgas (itself a premixed mixture of methane, air, oxygen, and nitrogen) to the burner. The soot particles passed vertically through the flame front and continued burning in the post-flame gas flowing through the quartz tube oxidation duct. The oxygen concentration and temperature of the post-flame soot oxidation gas were controllable by adjusting the flowrate and composition of the burner feedgas. Diesel soot particles were sampled at different heights along the centreline of the quartz tube above the burner. Profiles of oxygen concentration, temperature, and soot particle velocity in the oxidation zone were thus measured. Morphology and size distributions of the sampled diesel soot particles were analyzed by means of Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and a computer software called ImagePro Plus. Subsequently, the specific surface oxidation rates of the soot particles were worked out based on soot particle size distributions. The TEM micrographs obtained in this study showed that the diesel soot agglomerates existed in forms of clusters and chains, each containing between a small number and thousands of individual, mostly spherical tiny particles. Of order 97% of the individual spherical particles (spherules) had a size range from 10 to 80 nm. Occasionally, individual spherules of about 150 nm in diameter could be observed. The diesel soot particles sampled from the pre-chamber of the engine had different size distributions from those sampled from the exhaust of the engine, indicating that the soot underwent an oxidation process in the combustion chamber. Soot oxidation experiments were performed in the burner post-flame gas under oxygen partial pressures ranging from 0.010 to 0.050 atm and temperatures from 1520 to 1820 K. The test results showed that the oxidation rates of the diesel soot extracted from the diesel engine were generally lower than those predicted by the well-known Nagle and Strickland-Constable formula; however, the measured oxidation rates were higher than the predictions made with another well-known formula - the Lee formula. The soot extracted from the engine pre-chamber appeared not to oxidize as fast as the soot extracted from the exhaust of the engine. CO2 gas injection to the post-flame oxidation gas at constant oxygen partial pressure and oxidation temperature seemed to have accelerated the diesel soot oxidation rate. Based on the experimental results of this study and the results of other researchers, modifications to the Nagle and Strickland-Constable formula and to the Lee formula were accomplished. Also, an empirical expression, as an alternative to semi-empirical formulae, was worked out and presented in the thesis.

This investigation examines the effects of load, speed, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) level and hydrogen addition level on the exhaust gas emissions, particulate matter size distribution and chemical composition. The experiments were performed on a 2.0 litre, 4 cylinder, direct injection engine. EGR levels were then varied from 0% to 40%. Hydrogen induction was varied between 0 and 10% vol. of the inlet charge. In the case of using hydrogen and EGR, the hydrogen replaced air. The load was varied from 0 to 5.4 bar BMEP at two engine speeds, 1500 rpm and 2500 rpm. For this investigation the carbon monoxide (CO), total unburnt hydrocarbons (THC), nitrogen oxides (NOX) and the filter smoke number (FSN) were all measured. The in-cylinder pressure was also captured to allow the heat release rate to be calculated and, therefore, the combustion to be analysed. A gravimetric analysis of the particulate matter size distribution was conducted using a nano-MOUDI. Finally, a GC-MS was used to determine the chemical composition of the THC emissions. The experimental data showed that although CO, FSN and THC increase with EGR, NOX emissions decrease. Inversely, CO, FSN and THC emissions decrease with hydrogen, but NOX increases. When hydrogen was introduced the peak cylinder pressure was increased, as was the maximum rate of in-cylinder pressure rise. The position of the peak cylinder pressure was delayed as hydrogen addition increased. This together with the obtained heat release patterns shows an increase in ignition delay, and a higher proportion of premixed combustion. The experimental work showed that the particulate matter size distribution was not dramatically altered by the addition of EGR, but the main peak was slightly shifted towards the nucleation mode with the addition of hydrogen. Hydrogen addition does not appear to have a large effect on the chemical composition of the THC, but does dramatically decrease the emissions.