Shamit Bakshi

In gasoline direct injection engines, fuel injector nozzle is one of the vital components that determine the efficiency of fuel atomization which controls combustion and emission. There is an increased focus on developing better nozzles by studying the internal flow behavior especially during the needle transient phase and at the end of injection phase. Multiphase flow characteristics involving cavitation and hydraulic flip are observed inside the nozzle during its operation. At the end of injection, fuel inside the nozzle sac and nozzle holes is purged with the gas from the engine cylinder. The efficiency of this purging process is critical to prevent the carbon deposit formation on the wall of nozzle holes and on the surface of the nozzle tip. In this article, a numerical method is presented to predict the internal nozzle flow during the needle movement and during the end of injection to predict the purging capacity of a gasoline direct injection nozzle. Needle motion is accomplished using a moving mesh method via a user-defined function. The numerical model is compared with the X-ray measurements from the literature. Based on the validated model, the study is extended to analyze various parameters like injection pressure, nozzle hole location, number of nozzle holes and the inlet rounding of the nozzle hole which affects the effectiveness of nozzle purging. Fuel wetting at the nozzle tip after the end of injection is also numerically modeled to evaluate the thickness profile of the thin liquid film.

A simple computational model was created to predict the vaporization rates of droplets of urea-water-solution (UWS) evaporating in a hot air stream. A single-component evaporation model, which was based on Abramzon-Sirignano's vaporization model, was adapted to handle UWS droplets, and the governing equations were solved numerically in MATLAB®. The temperature and species concentrations within the droplet were assumed to be uniform, and various methods available in literature were employed to estimate important thermophysical properties such as saturation vapor pressures, partial pressures, vaporization enthalpy, and vapor diffusivities. The suitability and limitations of the computational model were assessed by comparing the results with experimental data on UWS droplets evaporating under forced convective conditions. The temperatures considered in this study ranged from 373 K to 673 K, and the corresponding relative air velocities were between 1.5 m/s and 4.3 m/s. The model was found to be able to capture the two-stage vaporization behavior of the UWS droplet (except crystallization, puffing and micro-explosion) with reasonable accuracy. While the first-stage vaporization rates, predicted by the model, were accurate to within 1.8% to 17.7%, the accuracies of the second-stage vaporization rates were significantly dependent on the methods used to estimate fluid properties such as the vapor pressures and the vaporization enthalpy.

High-pressure die casting (HPDC) is a widely used process with short cycle times to manufacture complex shapes of aluminium castings for the automotive industry. Most of the die casting companies use specialized commercial software to simulate molten metal filling and solidification. This approach works satisfactorily and is industrially accepted for defect prediction capability. Die cooling is an effective technique to reduce internal porosity in die cast components. But die cooling process is not completely captured in the approach used in the casting simulations. This often resulted in false positives in the defect predictions. One of the main reasons for the lack of precision in simulation is the uncertainty in assigning the boundary conditions such as heat transfer coefficients (HTC) for the die cooling channel. In this study, a coupled simulation strategy was developed to determine accurate HTC values of the die cooling channel. The computational domain was divided into two sub-domains, i.e., casting zone and die cooling zone. Two different industrially accepted simulation tools were used: (a) for casting simulation and (b) for turbulent fluid flow and heat transfer simulation in the cooling channel. A series of iterations were performed by exchanging information at the interface between the two sub-domains till the convergence was achieved. Experiments were also conducted with a thermocouple inserted in the die and the actual die temperature readings were measured. The converged simulation results agreed well with the experimental measurements. Also, the influence of flow rate on HTC was studied by conducting experiments with two different flow rates and the castings produced were analyzed with the help of CT scan analysis, micro-structure evaluation and thermal imaging. The obtained results demonstrated the efficacy of the method adopted in prescribing the values of heat transfer conditions in casting simulations. With the coupled simulation approach developed in this work, parametric studies were conducted to maximize the heat removal rate from a given die, for different flow velocities, nozzle diameters, cooling hole diameters and nozzle-to-surface spacings.

The behavior of droplets of urea-water-solution (UWS) evaporating under the influence of a hot stream of air was investigated experimentally, under temperatures ranging from 100°C to 400°C. The droplets were suspended on a glass microfiber to minimize the influence of heat conduction, through the fiber, on the evaporation rate of the droplet. The flow rate of air, under all experimental conditions, was measured and these data were used to estimate the average velocity of air around the droplet. Experiments were also conducted on droplets of pure water and the results were compared. The initial mass fraction of urea, in the solution, did not appear to have a significant effect on the evaporation constant, but it did affect a few essential aspects of the evaporation behavior. The evaporation of water droplets was in accordance with the d2 law at all temperatures, whereas the evaporation of UWS droplets was ambient-temperature dependent.

Metal powders are often made by gas atomization of liquid metal. During the process, liquid metal which flows from a melt delivery tube (MDT) is atomized by high speed gas discharging from a gas nozzle. In this work, the effect of the melt delivery tube position on atomization outcomes such as the yield, mass median diameter, and spread of the particle size distribution, is studied experimentally. A melt atomization setup (pilot-scale) is used to produce tin powder by gas-atomization. Three MDT positions, namely, intruded, extruded and flush with respect to the gas nozzle, are chosen for this study. Three pressure regimes (atmospheric, aspiration and pressurization) are established by varying the relative distance between the MDT and the gas nozzle exit for the three positions. Experimental investigations revealed that the intruded position produces powder with lower mean particle sizes and lower spread than the extruded configuration. The intruded position also gives a significantly higher yield compared to the extruded and flush positions at low gas flow rates, and hence appears to be the most suited for metal atomization using a free-fall configuration.