Computational Modeling of Natural Gas Injection in a Large Bore Engine

The topic of this paper is the computational modeling of gas injection through various poppet valve geometries in a large bore engine. The objective of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the significance of the poppet valve and the piston top in controlling the mixing of the injected fuel with the air in the cylinder. In this paper, the flow past the poppet valve into the engine cylinder is computed for both a low (4 bar) and a high pressure (35 bar) injection process using unshrouded and shrouded valves. Experiments using PLIF (planar laser induced fluorescence) are used to visualize the actual fluid flow for the valve geometries considered. The results indicate that for low injection pressures the gas flow around a typical poppet valve collapses to the axis of symmetry of the valve downstream of the poppet. At high pressure, the gas flow from this simple poppet valve does not collapse, but rather expands outward and flows along the cylinder wall. At high pressures, addition of a shroud around the poppet valve was effective in directing the supersonic flow toward the center of the cylinder. Additional computations with a moving piston show that at top dead center, the flammable volume fraction and turbulence intensity with high pressure shrouded injection are larger than for low pressure injection.