Analysis of the HCCI combustion of a turbocharged truck engine using a stochastic reactor model

Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engines arouse great interest due to their high thermal efficiency and very low emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulates. Critical issue of the HCCI combustion is the control of the engine since the combustion process is mostly dominated by chemical kinetics. Therefore the accurate assessment of the chemical kinetic is fundamental in numerical simulation of this kind of engines. Experimentally it has been demonstrated that even in HCCI engine the charge within the cylinder is not fully homogeneous, but many quantities, such as temperature, density and equivalence ratio, vary along the combustion chamber. These inhomogeneities influence the combustion process and yield the homogeneous reactor model to be not completely adequate to simulate HCCI combustion. This paper focuses on the use of a stochastic rector model in order to account for temperature inhomogeneities in the numerical simulation of the HCCI combustion. Moreover, the chemical kinetic code has been coupled to GT - Power Code, a 1-D fluid dynamics code, in order to accurately simulate the operation of a turbocharged truck engine.