A comprehensive study of spray and combustion characteristics of a prototype injector for gasoline compression ignition (GCI) application

In this study, the spray and combustion characteristics of high reactivity gasoline (HRG) fuel of RON 77 were tested and compared with E10 certification fuel under the gasoline compression ignition (GCI) engine conditions using a high-pressure multi-hole GCI engine injector. A comprehensive characterization in terms of the rate of injection, spray morphology under flash boiling conditions, penetration lengths under both nonevaporative and evaporative conditions, and ignition delay at reactive conditions was performed. It was found that both the high reactivity gasoline and E10 certification fuel exhibit very similar characteristics. The ignition delay times were found to be very similar between both the fuels tested under ambient temperatures higher than 800 K. This work further serves as an extensive database to validate and calibrate the spray models, combustion models and reaction mechanisms for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) driven development of GCI engines.