Critical evaluation of current heat transfer models used in CFD in-cylinder engine simulations and establishment of a comprehensive wall-function formulation

The scope of the present study is to try to determine a comprehensive heat transfer formulation, which would be able to predict adequately the heat transfer mechanism on a wide range of different reciprocating engine configurations (spark-ignition and diesel engines) and operating conditions. To this aim, four of the most popular heat transfer formulations used in commercial and research CFD (computational fluid dynamics) codes are evaluated comparatively against available experimental data, using an in-house CFD model that has already been applied satisfactorily for the simulation of a spark-ignition and a diesel engine running under motoring conditions. The comparison reveals that most of the existing wall heat transfer formulations fail to predict adequately both the history and peak value of the heat flux. Nonetheless, the predicted trends of the heat flux during the entire closed part of the engine cycle are similar, with higher differences occurring during the expansion phase. To overcome this, the present authors proceeded to the development of a new wall heat transfer formulation based on the existing ones. This new formulation is used in the in-house CFD model for the simulation of the heat transfer through the cylinder walls for the same engines and operating conditions as those used for the comparative evaluation of the existing heat transfer models. Comparing the calculated heat flux using the five heat transfer models with the corresponding measured one, it is concluded that in most cases the new model predicts more accurately the heat transfer during the compression stroke for motored operation and at the same time the predicted peak heat flux is closer to the experimental one. Although a more fundamental formulation is used to describe the heat transfer process, the computational time required is not affected, which is a parameter crucial for multi-dimensional modeling.Heat transfer Motoring CFD model Law-of-the-wall Spark-ignition engine Diesel engine

Investigating the effect of crevice flow on internal combustion engines using a new simple crevice model implemented in a CFD code

A theoretical investigation is conducted to examine the way the crevice regions affect the mean cylinder pressure, the in-cylinder temperature, and the velocity field of internal combustion engines running at motoring conditions. For the calculation of the wall heat flux, a wall heat transfer formulation developed by the authors is used, while for the simulation of the crevices and the blow-by a newly developed simplified simulation model is presented herein. These sub-models are incorporated into an in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. The main advantage of the new crevice model is that it can be applied in cases where no detailed information of the ring-pack configuration is available, which is important as this information is rarely known or may have been altered during the engine's life. Thus, an adequate estimation of the blow-by effect on the cylinder pressure can be drawn. To validate the new model, the measured in-cylinder pressure traces of a diesel engine, located at the authors' laboratory, running under motoring conditions at four engine speeds were used as reference, together with measured velocity profiles and turbulence data of a motored spark-ignition engine. Comparing the predicted and measured cylinder pressure traces of the diesel engine for all cases examined, it is observed that by incorporating the new crevice sub-model into the in-house CFD code, significant improvements on the predictive accuracy of the model is obtained. The calculated cylinder pressure traces almost coincide with the measured ones, thus avoiding the use of any calibration constants as would have been the case with the crevice effect omitted. Concerning the radial and swirl velocity profiles and the turbulent kinetic energy measured in the spark-ignition engine, the validation process revealed that the developed crevice model has a minor influence on the aforementioned parameters. The theoretical study has been extended by investigating in the same spark-ignition engine, during the induction and compression strokes, the way crevice flow affects the thermodynamic properties of the air trapped in the cylinder.Engine CFD code Crevice model Blow-by Motoring Heat transfer