Improvement in Thermal Efficiency of Lean Burn Pre-Chamber Natural Gas Engine by Optimization of Combustion System

To understand the mechanism of the combustion by torch flame jet in a gas engine with pre-chamber and also to obtain the strategy of improving thermal efficiency by optimizing the structure of pre-chamber including the diameter and number of orifices, the combustion process was investigated by three dimensional numerical simulations and experiments of a single cylinder natural gas engine. As a result, the configuration of orifices was found to affect the combustion performance strongly. With the same orifice diameter of 1.5mm, thermal efficiency with 7 orifices in pre-chamber was higher than that with 4 orifices in pre-chamber, mainly due to the reduction of heat loss by decreasing the impingement of torch flame on the cylinder linear. Better thermal efficiency was achieved in this case because the flame propagated area increases rapidly while the flame jets do not impinge on the cylinder wall intensively. This means that the optimization of orifice diameter and its number is quite important to enhance the flame propagation without increasing heat loss.