Simulation of Combustion Recession After End-of-Injection at Diesel Engine Conditions

Recent experimental observations show that lifted diesel flames tend to propagate back toward the injector after the end-of-injection (EOI) under conventional high-temperature conditions. The term “combustion recession” has been adopted to reflect this process dominated by “auto-ignition” reactions. This phenomenon is closely linked to the EOI entrainment wave and its impact on the transient mixture–chemistry evolution upstream of the lift-off length. A few studies have explored the physics of combustion recession with experiments and simplified modeling, but the details of the chemical kinetics and convective–diffusive transport of reactive scalars and the capability of engine computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to accurately capture them are mainly unexplored. In this study, highly resolved numerical simulations have been employed to explore the mixing and combustion of a diesel spray after the EOI and the influence of modeling choices on the prediction of these phenomena. The simulations are centered on a temperature sweep around the engine combustion network (ECN) spray-A conditions, from 800 to 1000 K, where different combustion recession behaviors are observed experimentally. Reacting spray simulations are performed via openfoam, using a Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approach with a traditional Lagrangian–Eulerian coupled formulation. Two reduced chemical kinetics models for n-dodecane are used to evaluate the impact of low-temperature chemistry and mechanism formulation on predictions of combustion recession behavior. Observations from the numerical simulations are consistent with recent findings that a two-stage auto-ignition sequence drives the combustion recession process. Simulations with two different chemical mechanisms indicate that low-temperature chemistry reactions drive the likelihood of combustion recession.