EXAMPLE OF FLOW MODELLING CHARACTERISTICS IN DIESEL ENGINE NOZZLE

Modern transport is still based on vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Due to stricter ecological requirements, the designers of engines are continually challenged to develop more environmentally friendly engines with the same power and performance. Unfortunately, there are not any significant novelties and innovations available at present which could significantly change the current direction of the development of this type of propulsion machines. That is why the existing ones should be continually developed and improved or optimized their performance. By optimizing, we tend to minimize fuel consumption and lower exhaust emissions in order to meet the norms defined by standards (i.e. Euro standards). Those propulsion engines are actually developed to such extent that our current thinking will not be able to change their basic functionality, but possible opportunities for improvement, especially the improvement of individual components, could be introduced. The latter is possible by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which can relatively quickly and inexpensively produce calculations prior to prototyping and implementation of accurate measurements on the prototype. This is especially useful in early stages of development or at optimization of dimensional small parts of the object where the physical execution of measurements is impossible or very difficult. With advances of computational fluid dynamics, the studies on the nozzles and outlet channel injectors have been relieved. Recently, the observation and better understanding of the flow in nozzles at large pressure and high velocity is recently being possible. This is very important because the injection process, especially the dispersion of jet fuel, is crucial for the combustion process in the cylinder and consequently for the composition of exhaust gases. And finally, the chemical composition of the fuel has a strong impact on the formation of dangerous emissions, too. The research presents the influence of various volume mesh types on flow characteristics inside a fuel injector nozzle. Our work is based upon the creating of two meshes in the CFD software package. Each of them was used two times. First, a time-dependent mass flow rate was defined at the inlet region and pressure was defined at the outlet. The same mesh was later used to perform a simulation with a defined needle lift curve (and hereby the mesh movement) and inlet and outlet pressure. In next few steps we investigated which approach offered better results and would thus be most suitable for engineering usage.