Numerical study on steam injection in a turbocompound diesel engine for waste heat recovery

Steam injection and turbocompouding are both effective methods for engine waste heat recovery. The fuel saving potential obtained by the combination of the two methods is not clear. Based on a turbocompound engine developed in the previous study, the impacts of pre-turbine steam injection on the fuel saving potentials, of the turbocompound engine were investigated in this paper. Firstly, thermodynamic cycle model for the baseline turbocompound engine is established using commercial software GT-POWER. The cycle model is calibrated with the experiment data of the turbocompound engine and achieves high accuracy. After that, the influences of steam mass flow rate, evaporating pressure and injection location on the engine performance are studied. In addition, the impacts of hot liquid water injection are also investigated. The results show that steam injection at the turbocharger turbine inlet can reduce the turbocompound engine BSFC at all speed conditions. The largest fuel reduction 6.15% is obtained at 1000 rpm condition. However, steam injection at power turbine inlet can only lower the BSFC at high speed conditions. Besides, it is found that hot liquid water injection in the exhaust cannot improve the engine performance. When compared with the conventional turbocharged engine, the combination of turbocompounding and steam injection can reduce the BSFC by 6.0-11.2% over different speeds. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.