Date of Award

10-1-2021

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Mechanical, Automotive, and Materials Engineering

Keywords

CFD, Constant volume combustion chamber, Lab scale, OpenFOAM, Quantification, Sparkplug

Supervisor

J. Defoe

Supervisor

M. Zheng

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

Lean burn has been considered an effective strategy to improve the thermal efficiency of spark-ignition engines. Under lean or diluted conditions, however, the combustion speed is reduced. Therefore, to speed up the combustion, in-cylinder turbulence is induced which may impede the spark initiation. This research aims to quantify the turbulence in a constant volume optical combustion chamber.

An Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) study was done to understand the turbulence characteristics of the flow in the optical chamber. Spark anemometry was used to obtain a relationship between the spark plasma evolution and freestream velocity. Finally, this technique has been applied to the turbulent flow inside the combustion chamber to determine the cross-flow velocity. The calculated numerical cross-flow velocity was found to be in reasonable agreement with its empirical counterpart.

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