Simulating In-Cylinder Combustion and Conjugate Heat Transfer in a Single-Cylinder Engine
This video shows a CONVERGE simulation of multiple engine cycles of a port fuel injection single-cylinder ATV engine (geometry courtesy of Paul Hammerstrom Design). We simulated the fuel injection, the combustion within the chamber, and the surrounding solid components (including the head, valves, valve guides, valve seats, engine block, spark plug, cylinder liner, and piston). You can see three cutplanes of the simulated geometry. On the far left, we show the simulation detail around the spark plug. The middle and the right show perpendicular views of the domain. Fuel parcels (black) are injected into the intake port, flow into the cylinder, and vaporize. The spark plug ignites the fuel-air mixture, which moves the piston downward. We leverage CONVERGE’s super-cycling feature to calculate heat transfer in the engine block in a reasonable computational time, given the problem of disparate time scales between the solid and fluid heat transfer. CONVERGE iterates between fully-coupled transient and steady-state solvers to rapidly simulate both the combustion within the chamber and the heat transfer to the surrounding solid components.
Convergent Science's CONVERGE is an innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process through autonomous meshing.
