An extended multi-zone combustion model for PCI simulation

Novel combustion modes are becoming an important area of research with emission regulations more stringent than ever before, and with fuel economy being assigned greater importance every day. Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) and Premixed Compression Ignition (PCI) modes in particular promise better fuel economy and lower emissions in internal combustion engines. Multi-zone combustion models have been popular in modelling HCCI combustion. In this work, an improved multi-zone model is suggested for PCI combustion modelling. A new zoning scheme is suggested based on incorporating the internal energy of formation into an earlier conventional HCCI multi-zone approach, which considers a two-dimensional reaction space defined by equivalence ratio and temperature. It is shown that the added dimension improves zoning by creating more representative zones, and thus reducing errors compared to the conventional zoning approach, when applied to PCI simulation.