Phenomenology of Diesel Combustion and Modeling Diesel is the most
efficient combustion engine today and it plays an important role in
transport of goods and passengers on land and on high seas. The
emissions must be controlled as stipulated by the society without
sacrificing the legendary fuel economy of the diesel engines. These
important drivers caused innovations in diesel engineering like
re-entrant combustion chambers in the piston, lower swirl support and
high pressure injection, in turn reducing the ignition delay and hence
the nitric oxides. The limits on emissions are being continually
reduced. The- fore, the required accuracy of the models to predict the
emissions and efficiency of the engines is high. The phenomenological
combustion models based on physical and chemical description of the
processes in the engine are practical to describe diesel engine
combustion and to carry out parametric studies. This is because the
injection process, which can be relatively well predicted, has the
dominant effect on mixture formation and subsequent course of
combustion. The need for improving these models by incorporating new
developments in engine designs is explained in Chapter 2. With "model
based control programs" used in the Electronic Control Units of the
engines, phenomenological models are assuming more importance now
because the detailed CFD based models are too slow to be handled by the
Electronic Control Units. Experimental work is necessary to develop the
basic understanding of the pr- esses.
