Return to search

A single droplet auto-ignition of surrogate fuels, lubricant oil and their mixtures at elevated temperature and pressure

Pre-ignition is a type of irregular combustion that occurs in boosted direct injection gasoline engines when one or more auto-ignition events occur before to spark ignition. Due to the direct injection of fuel into the cylinder, some liquid fuel may splash off the walls, dragging along lubricating oil. The self-ignition of liquid fuel/lubricant droplets is one of the pre-ignition sources studied. To test this stochastic behavior in a controlled manner, we examined the auto-ignition of a single droplet of a hexadecane-fuel mixture, with hexadecane serving as a surrogate for the lub oil. This experiment involved suspending a single hexadecane-fuel mixture droplet on a thermocouple bead in preheated air at temperatures ranging from 150 to 300 ° C over a wide range of pressures (4-30 bar). Various fuels with RON values ranging from 0 to 120 were blended with hexadecane at varying volume percentages of fuel in hexadecane from 0% to 100% to determine the droplet's time to ignition, denoted by TI. TI was determined by concurrently recording the history of the droplet temperature and imaging it at high speed. The ignition of the droplet is triggered by the self-ignition of the combustible mixture created by the vapor of the hexadecane-fuel mixture reacting with the heated ambient air surrounding the droplet. The increase in RON increased the TI as high RON fuels are difficult to ignite. However, the TI of the mixture depended on the fuel mixture properties even when the RON of the mixture was relatively high.
Furthermore, the metal additives were added to the oil surrogate to investigate their effect on getting a pre-ignition event. The lubricant oil additives were phosphate, magnesium, and calcium. These additives were mixed with hexadecane at different concentrations. The experiments were conducted in a constant volume combustion chamber at 300 ⁰C temperature and the pressure was varied from 5 to 15 bar. The resulting TI were then compared with the TI of pure hexadecane. The results showed that addition of phosphate reduces the chances of getting a pre-ignition event, magnesium showed neutral effect while calcium enhanced the chances of getting a pre-ignition event.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/670348
Date07 1900
CreatorsMaharjan, Sumit
ContributorsRoberts, William L., Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division, Sarathy, Mani, Knio, Omar, Yang, Yi
Source SetsKing Abdullah University of Science and Technology
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
Rights2022-07-28, At the time of archiving, the student author of this dissertation opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this dissertation will become available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2022-07-28.

Page generated in 0.0016 seconds