High-speed flow and fuel imaging study of available spark energy in a spray-guided direct-injection engine and implications on misfires

The spark energy transferred under the highly stratified conditions during late injection in a spray-guided spark-ignition direct-injection (SG-SIDI) engine is not well characterized. The impact of high pressures, temperatures, velocities, and variations in local fuel concentration along with temporal and/or spatial variations on spark performance must be better characterized. Previous spark ignition studies have not addressed the full range of conditions that are present in SG-SIDI engines. Therefore, high-speed particle image velocimetry (PIV) experiments are conducted to characterize the spark energy dependence for a wide range of well-defined homogeneous fuel—air equivalence ratios (Φ = —2.9) and average air velocities (0—8 m/s) in an optical SG-SIDI engine. A moderate dependence of spark energy on equivalence ratio is shown to exist with average values of spark energy increasing by 21 per cent for the equivalence ratio range of Φ = —2.3. Air injection into the motored engine is used to prepare well-d...