Further study on wall film effects and flame quenching under engine thermodynamic conditions

Abstract In direct-injection engines, the formation of fuel wall film on piston surface and liner wall is a primary cause for emissions of unburnt hydrocarbons and particulate matter. It is therefore important to investigate the behavior and effect of a wall fuel film under typical engine conditions. Following our previous study of wall film effects on flame propagation and quenching under constant thermodynamic conditions (Tao et al. IJER, 2018), more complexities rooted in real engine conditions have been considered in the current work, including two real engine in-cylinder thermodynamic trajectories occurring at catalyst warming (CW) and low-speed high-load (LSHL) conditions, varying fuel wall film thickness accounting for both vaporization and condensation, and the stagnation boundary layer flow over the wall film. To shed light on the role of wall heat transfer, parameter sweeping of wall temperature is conducted from 303 K to 363 K. Two representative wall film models using empirical vaporization rate and gas-liquid interface heat flux are compared with our numerical simulation. A good correlation between vapor boundary thickness and quenching distance has been found. Competition between enhanced vaporization due to tangential convection and aggravate condensation from elevated pressure is also demonstrated. The results lead to useful insights into the behavior of a wall film in real engine in-cylinder thermodynamic conditions and could be used to construct low dimensional empirical wall film models in three-dimensional engine combustion modeling.