Characteristics of pressure wave in common rail fuel injection system of high-speed direct injection diesel engines

The latest generation of high-pressure common rail equipment now provides diesel engines possibility to apply as many as eight separate injection pulses within the engine cycle for reducing emissions and for smoothing combustion. With these complicated injection arrangements, optimizations of operating parameters for various driving conditions are considerably difficult, particularly when integrating fuel injection parameters with other operating parameters such as exhaust gas recirculation rate and boost pressure together for evaluating calibration results. Understanding the detailed effects of fuel injection parameters upon combustion characteristics and emission formation is therefore particularly critical. In this article, the results and discussion of experimental investigations on a high-speed direct injection light-duty diesel engine test bed are presented for evaluating and analyzing the effects of main adjustable parameters of the fuel injection system on all regulated emission gases and torque performance. Main injection timing, rail pressure, pilot amount, and particularly pilot timing have been examined. The results show that optimization of each of those adjustable parameters is beneficial for emission reduction and torque improvement under different operating conditions. By exploring the variation in the interval between the pilot injection and the main injection, it is found that the pressure wave in the common rail has a significant influence on the subsequent injection. This suggests that special attentions must be paid for adjusting pilot timing or any injection interval when multi-injection is used. With analyzing the fuel amount oscillation of the subsequent injections to pilot separation, it demonstrates that the frequency of regular oscillations of the actual fuel amount or the injection pulse width with the variation in pilot separation is always the same for a specified fuel injection system, regardless of engine speed, fuel amount, injection pulse, and injection pressure.