Investigation of oxyfuel combustion on engine performance and emissions in a DI diesel HCCI engine

Due to stronger environmental standard aims, the European Union (EU) has recently adopted more stringent limits for emissions from inland waterway vessels. The objective of “RIVER” project is to apply an oxyfuel combustion technology for diesel engines that eliminates NOx emissions, and captures and stores all carbon dioxide emissions in order to achieve zero-carbon and zero other pollutant emissions. As part of this project, a 3-D computational fluid dynamics model coupled with detailed chemical kinetics has been used to evaluate the influence of oxyfuel combustion on engine operating conditions and combustion characteristic in a high speed direct injection (HSDI) diesel engine under homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI) mode. In this work, a reduced chemical n-heptane-n-butanol-PAH mechanism which consists 76 species and 349 reactions has been applied to simulate the combustion process. The mechanism has been initially validated by experiments under HCCI combustion mode and then, it has been used to examine the oxyfuel combustion using different diluent strategies over a range of air-fuel equivalence ratio (lambda). The simulation results indicate that increasing the inlet carbon dioxide concentration, as a diluent gas, under constant fueling rate does not bring any serious change to the amount of brake mean effective pressure (BMEP) in the relatively rich mixtures regions. However, by decreasing the fuel rate (higher lambda) the difference between different diluent strategies become more obvious as the minimum amount of BMEP is achieved when 83% of carbon dioxide is used. In addition, the results show a considerable reduction of PM emissions while the NOx emission have been completely eliminated using oxyfuel combustion.