Review of high efficiency and clean reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion in internal combustion engines

Methanol is an alternative, renewable, environmentally and economically attractive fuel; it is considered to be one of the most favorable fuels for conventional fossil-based fuels. Methanol has been recently used as an alternative to conventional fuels for internal combustion (IC) engines in order to satisfy some environmental and economical concerns. Because of a number of relatively large research projects that have been ongoing recently, much progress has been made that is worth reporting. This paper systematically describes the methanol productions, including the productions from coal, natural gas, coke-oven gas, hydrogen, biomass etc. It introduces the potentials of methanol as a renewable resource taking into account the world supply and demand, economic benefits and the effects on human health and the environment. Thirteen methods of application such as methanol/gasoline, methanol/diesel blends which can be used on the IC engines are summarized. Finally, this paper puts forward some new suggestions on the weakness in the researches of methanol engine.

An overview of methanol as an internal combustion engine fuel

Evolution, challenges and path forward for low temperature combustion engines

Modelling of fuel droplet heating and evaporation: Recent results and unsolved problems

Numerical study on the combustion and emission characteristics of a methanol/diesel reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) engine

A semidecoupling methodology for developing skeletal chemical kinetic models is presented and applied to con- struct an enhanced skeletal model for PRF (primary reference fuel) oxidation, which consists of 41 species and 124 reactions. The basic idea and the semidecoupling methodology are to consider the oxidation mechanism of alkane as two parts: a com- prehensive part to describe detailed reaction processes of C0−C1 radicals and molecules as the 'core' and a skeletal part that couples the 'core' to control the ignition characteristics. Accounting for the major weakness in the existing skeletal models for PRF oxidation, the enhancement on the new skeletal model mainly focuses on the laminar flame speed and important species evolution while maintaining the precise ignition delay prediction of the previous models. The new PRF skeletal model is validated against various experimental data including shock tube, jet-stirred reactor, flow reactor, premixed laminar flame speed, and internal combustion engines over a wide range of temperatures, pressures, and equivalence ratios. The results show good agree- ment with the experimental data, indicating that the semidecoupling methodology and the new skeletal model are promising for various reactors and engine applications incorporated with a multidimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model.

Yaodong Liu

Papers

Numerical study on the combustion and emission characteristics of a methanol/diesel reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) engine

Enhancement on a Skeletal Kinetic Model for Primary Reference Fuel Oxidation by Using a Semidecoupling Methodology

Parametric study and optimization of a RCCI (reactivity controlled compression ignition) engine fueled with methanol and diesel

Development of a skeletal mechanism for diesel surrogate fuel by using a decoupling methodology

Development of a new skeletal mechanism for n-decane oxidation under engine-relevant conditions based on a decoupling methodology