Impact of intake port injection of water on boosted downsized gasoline direct injection engine combustion, efficiency and emissions

Introduction of ever more stringent emission regulations on internal combustion engines beyond 2020 makes it necessary for original equipment manufacturers to find cost-effective solutions to improve the combustion engine efficiency and decrease its emissions. Highly efficient combustion engines can benefit from technologies such as cooled external exhaust gas recalculation and water injection. Among these technologies water injection can be used as a promising method to mitigate knock and significantly reduce the CO2 emissions. This is particularly important in highly downsized boosted engines which run under much higher intake pressures and are more prone to knocking combustion. In addition to anti-knock behaviour, water injection is also an effective method for reducing NOx emissions and exhaust gas temperature at high loads, which can protect the turbine in turbocharged engines. This study shows the influence of intake port injection of water on efficiency and emissions of a boosted downsized single-cylinder gasoline direct-injection engine in detail. Six different steady-state speed and load combinations were selected to represent the conditions that knocking combustion start to occur. Water ratio sweep tests were performed to find out the optimum water/fuel ratio at each test point and the impact on the combustion and emissions. In addition to gaseous emissions, impact of water injection on particle emissions was also investigated in this study. The results show the net indicated efficiency improved significantly (by a maximum of around 5% at medium load and around 15% at high load) up to a maximum level by increasing the injected water mass. Improvement in efficiency was mainly due to the increased heat capacity of charge and cooling effect of the injected water evaporation which reduced the in-cylinder temperature and pressure. Thus, knock sensitivity was reduced and more advanced spark timings could be used, which shifted the combustion phasing closer to the optimum point. However, increasing the water/fuel ratio further (more than 1 at medium load and more than 1.5 at high load) deteriorated the combustion efficiency, prolonged the flame development angle and combustion duration, and caused a reduction in the net integrated area of the P-V diagram. Efficiency improvements were lower at higher engine speed (3000 r/min) as the knock sensitivity was already reduced intrinsically. In terms of other, harmful, non-CO2 emissions, water injection was effective in reducing the NOx emissions significantly (by a maximum of around 60%) but increased the HC emissions as the water/fuel ratio increased. The results also show a significant reduction in particle emissions by adding water to the mixture and advancing the spark timing at medium and high loads. In addition, water injection also reduced the exhaust gas temperature by around 80 degrees C and 180 degrees C at medium and high loads, respectively.