The Use of Intake and Exhaust Measurements with Computer Simulations to Investigate the Evolution of the Internal Flow Field in a Ported Engine

Recent measurements by of gas intake flows and exhaust pressure in a motored, ported, single-cylinder engine with strong swirl and roll have been used as boundary conditions to a three-dimensional, transient computer simulation of the flow within the cylinder. For each condition, the calculation is continued over several engine cycles until the periodic solution is obtained. The computed TDC tangential velocity and turbulence intensity are then compared with measured ones. A technique is described to evaluate scavenging efficiency, the fraction of charge that remains in the cylinder over later cycles and the degree of mixedness of fresh and residual charge. For this motored ported engine, it is found that the scavenging efficiency is very low (19.4% at 1200 RPM) and the inflow from the exhaust ports is very significant. For practical ported engines with combustion, the scavenging efficiency is much higher but the inflows from exhaust ports are still expected to be significant. Thus computations over many cycles are required and numerical accuracy may become an issue, particularly as far as the evaluation of the roll angular momentum is concerned.