Diesel engine combustion is characterized by dual burning involving a rich premixed flame (where most of the soot; HC and CO concentrations
develop) and a diffusion flame (where they are consumed while NOx production mainly occurs).
Emissions are determined by each mode relative contribution, which depends on the flame stabilization region (that, in turn, strongly depends on the fuel-air mixing and ignition behavior upstream of the flame).
To capture these characteristics, the current model combines the liquid breakup and atomization stages with droplet evaporation, mixing and ignition delay periods.
The liquid sheet instability is simulated via the wave model [2] in conjunction with the k–ε model to quantify turbulence effects on the local droplet diameter.
Thewave model includes a computational fluid dynamics code that simulates the physics of the spray break-up.
This model describes droplet disintegration through liquid column break-up by a first order linear analysis of the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability growing on the surface of a cylindrical liquid jet penetrating into a stationary gas.
The liquid and gaseous phases are coupled via the source term exchange for mass, momentum, energy and turbulence. Turbulent convection from boundary walls and gases either heats up the droplets or sustains vaporization.
The Shell model is used to predict the chemical ignition delay, while the NDS reduced multi-step kinetics of Pang et al. is employed to predict the heat release rates during combustion stages to indicate the contour mapping for both equivalence ratio and temperatures.
To predict the ignition delay, such NDS model (standing for Nottingham diesel Surrogate model) comprises a reduced mechanism with 107 reactions and 44 species.
These species have been selected by identifying the reactions important to ignition and combustion (as reflected from the significance of the thermodynamic effect within the time interval wherein the rate of temperature rise is the maximum).