Project title: The impact of combustion-generated moieties on the degradation of ICE related surface materials

Supervisors: Prof R. Peter Lindstedt, Dr Daniel Dini, Dr Konstantinos Gkagkas (TME)

Project description:

Combustion at high temperatures affect in-cylinder generated emissions that lead to increased material dependent surface degradation. The latter impacts friction and hence efficiency. In addition, interactions between the generated moieties and lubrication processes are important. Therefore, as a first step, the current project aims to determine the chemical species distribution close to surfaces as will result from advanced engine operation modes. The step requires the use of comprehensive detailed chemical kinetics for the fluid and the material surface [1-3] and the applied techniques will be used provide accurate thermochemical boundary conditions for the micro-scale study of interactions with the materials chemistry of the piston-liner. The determination of the species distribution using accurate methods is associated with exceptionally high computational costs. However, use of the transported probability density function (pdf) approach for the inclusion of the thermochemistry allows the development of highly efficient parallel algorithms for large stochastic [4] systems. This has been accomplished using CPU and GPU based systems. The initial development and validation of the parallel algorithms is based on previous studies [4] that include low temperature chemistry with an extension to more complex fuels and conditions to come in future work.

References:

[1]  Vincent, R.S., Lindstedt, R.P., Malik, N.A., Reid, I.A., Messenger, B.E., The Chemistry of Ethane Dehydrogenation over a Supported Platinum Catalyst, Journal of Catalysis, 260:37-64 (2008).

[2]  Kraus, P. and Lindstedt, R.P., Transition state theory based semi-automatic generation of surface reaction mechanisms, 15th International Conference on Numerical Combustion, Avignon, France, April 19-22, 2015.

[3]  Kraus, P. and Lindstedt, R.P., A DFT study of adsorption of ethane on oxygen-covered platinum clusters, 9th International Conference on Chemical Kinetics, Ghent, Belgium, June 28 – July 2, 2015.

[4] Gkagkas, K. and Lindstedt, R.P., Transported PDF Modelling with Detailed Chemistry of Pre- and Auto-Ignition in CH4/Air Mixtures, Proc. Combust. Inst., 31:1559-1566 (2007).