Combustion and Environmental Group/
Facilities
Quick link to: engine
lab, combustion lab, combustion wind tunnel, vehicle test lab
A Waukesha cooperative fuel research engine (CFR) is the main internal combustion engine facility for combustion analysis. CFR engine is standard engine for fuel octane rating according to ASTM standard. The engine in our group has a specialized cylinder head with 6 access holes in it for combustion visualization if necessary. The engine was modified to run in both high and low compression ratios from as high as 22:1 to 8:1. Here are technical specifications of the engine.
Intake system is equipped with two gaseous and one liquid port fuel injectors. A heater is installed inside the intake plenum to adjust intake temperature at any desired level between room temperature to more than 500 oC if necessary. An EGR line is connected from exhaust plenum to intake manifold after the heater and before fuel injectors.
Data acquisition system is based on National instrument and Labview programming. Cylinder pressure is taken by a Kistler 6043A water cooled pressure transducer with 0.1 crank angle resolution using a BEI optical encoder. Cylinder pressure is measured on real time consecutive cycles and pressure transducer is installed on the cylinder head next to spark plug.
Liquid and gaseous fuelling systems are designed to deliver the fuel at any constant desired pressure and temperature. Gaseous fuel flow rate is measured with Omega mass flow meter and liquid fuels volume flow rate is measured with a positive displacement Max Machinery flow meter. Engine control system is an open loop program based on AFS SparrowII and it is able to deliver two fuels at a time with capability of adjusting total fuel rate and ratio of two fuels.
Exhaust gas analysis is performed using California Analytical instrument with different station for each emission including CO2, CO, HC, NOx, and O2.
The engine laboratory is custom-made and flexible to develop variety sets of experiments on single-cylinder CFR engine.
Flame speed, combustion characteristics and other continuous combustion parameters can be studied in our combustion lab with two combustion chambers station. (combustion chamber 1, combustion chamber 2)
Combustion and environmental group has a wind tunnel designed to study the combustion in a cross flow. Wind tunnel is mainly used for flare project. Here is the specifications from flare project webpage.
There is several facilities and custom-made equipments for vehicle test on dynamometer and on-road.
