Assessment of the impacts of combustion chamber bowl geometry and injection timing on a reactivity controlled compression ignition engine at low and high load conditions

Abstract

The present paper aims to assess the impacts of diesel injection timing and two bowl geometries including re-entrant and wide-shallow combustion chambers on the combustion characteristics, emissions formation, and fuel consumption in a reactivity controlled compression ignition diesel engine under low and high load (five and nine bar indicating mean effective pressure) conditions. The results revealed that diesel injection at −60 CA ATDC under low load conditions significantly decreased soot and NOx emissions simultaneously for both piston bowl geometries. The use of the wide-shallow chamber decreased the period of the ignition delay and increased the engine operable load range as a result of more stable combustion under high-load conditions compared to the re-entrant chamber. Moreover, at all diesel injection timings, the indicated specific fuel consumption was decreased by nearly 4.8 and 6.6% under low and high load conditions, respectively when the wide-shallow combustion chamber was used since the heat transfer loss was lower than that of the re-entrant chamber. However, NOx emission under high load conditions at the center of the combustion chamber and more soot emission in the exhaust gas are two disadvantages of the wide-shallow chamber versus the re-entrant combustion chamber.