Experimental and analytical study on vapor phase and liquid penetration for a high pressure diesel injector

In this study, a macroscopic characterization has been performed on a solenoid diesel injector (2200 bar-8 hole nozzle) under various non-reacting but evaporative conditions. For vapor penetration a two pass Schlieren visualization set up was selected. A high speed camera was used to record high speed images of the injection event to analyze the transient evolution of the vapor phase of the spray. The transient liquid penetration of the spray has been measured via MIE-Scattering imaging technique using a high speed camera as well. Unsteady RANS based CFD Simulations have been performed to simulate the experimental conditions and correlation results are presented. Built-in models from commercial code StarCD have been used to model spray formation which includes submodels for turbulence, nozzle flow, break-up and fuel properties. A novel CAE process using an automation and optimization tool has been used to achieve robust model settings, and the final model prediction are compared with the experimental observation for the injector characterization with respect to the non-reacting spray penetration with change in ambient and injection conditions. The model correlates well with the sensitivities for temperature and injection pressures qualitatively however improvements required to capture the density effects mainly related to the mesh orientation, fixed time step size where further analysis required.