An Optical Study of DMF and Ethanol Combustion Under Dual-Injection Strategy

The new fuel, 2, 5-dimenthylfuran, known as DMF, captured worldwide attention since the discovery of its new production method. As a potential bio-fuel, DMF is competitive to gasoline in many areas, such as energy density, combustion efficiency and emissions. However, little work has been performed on its unconventional combustion mode. In this work, high speed imaging and thermal investigation are carried out to study DMF and gasoline dual-injection on a single cylinder, direct injection spark ignition optical engine. This dual-injection strategy combines direct injection (DI) and port fuel injection (PFI) simultaneously which means two different fuels can blend in the cylinder with any ratio. It provides a flexible way to use bio-fuels with gasoline. DMF DI with gasoline PFI and ethanol DI with gasoline PFI are studied under different injection proportions (by volume) and IMEPs. Under the same blend ratio, ethanol has the highest flame propagation speed compared with DMF and gasoline. DMF-gasoline dual-injection combustion has higher flame propagation speed and shorter combustion duration than baseline 100% gasoline PFI. The flame luminance of DMF-gasoline is much higher than ethanol-gasoline and pure gasoline. Mass Fraction Burn (MFB) and the flame propagation speed under 3bar IMEP and 5bar IMEP are investigated in the combustion analysis. The flame propagation speed of ethanol increases with the increase of IMEP. However, the engine load conditions have less influence on DMF-gasoline dual-injection flame propagation speed.