Late post-injection of biofuel blends in an optical diesel engine: Experimental and theoretical discussion on the inevitable wall-wetting effects on oil dilution

In a diesel engine, diesel particulate filter is used to reduce particle matter emissions. Diesel particulate filter requires periodic regenerations under high-temperature conditions in the exhaust pipe in order to oxidize the accumulated soot. A common strategy to produce high exhaust gas temperature is to inject late post-injections after the main injection. However, this practice may dilute the engine oil, causing engine wear. Biofuel addition to petroleum diesel may increase oil dilution even more. This is related to the fuel spray characteristics, the post-injection control and the vaporization process of fuel in engine oil. In this study, spray properties of late post-injection were studied with petroleum diesel and two types of transport biofuel blends containing 30% either fatty acid methyl ester or hydro-treated vegetable oil. Three different late post-injection timings were investigated. Image sequences of the main spray flame as well as the non-combusting late post-injection spray were extracted. In order to verify oil dilution during regeneration cycle and late post-injection, oil samples from six-cylinder test engine were analyzed. According to the present experiments, differences in the spray characteristics are not significant with the tested fuels. However, higher oil dilution rates were observed with fuel blend composed of 30% fatty acid methyl ester. All the studied late post-injection timings were noted to lead to the unwanted cylinder spray/wall interaction and wall-wetting consequently diluting the engine oil. The spray/wall interaction is thoroughly explained by introducing a theoretical/computational framework which characterizes any spray/wall interaction in terms of a phase diagram for any considered operation conditions. The novelty of this study arises from (1) first comparison of fatty acid methyl ester and hydro-treated vegetable oil blends in an optical engine, (2) strong evidence on the phenomena related to post-injection phase in six-cylinder and single-cylinder optical engine configurations and (3) the development of a single-droplet model showing inevitable wall-wetting.