Determination of diesel sprays characteristics in real engine in-cylinder air density and pressure conditions

The present paper centers on the establishment of a quantified relationship between the macroscopic visual parameters of a Diesel spray and its most influential factors. The factors considered are the ambient gas density, as an external condition relative to the injection system, and nozzle hole diameter and injection pressure as internal ones. The main purpose of this work is to validate and extend the different correlations available in the literature to the present state of the Diesel engine, i.e. high injection pressure, small nozzle holes, severe cavitating conditions, etc. Five mono-orifice, axi-symmetrical nozzles with different diameters have been studied in two different test rigs from which one can reproduce solely the real engine in-cylinder air density, and the other, both the density and the pressure. A parametric study was carried out and it enabled the spray tip penetration to be expressed as a function of nozzle hole diameter, injection pressure and environment gas density. The temporal synchronization of the penetration and injection rate data revealed a possible explanation for the discontinuity observed as well by other authors in the spray’s penetration law. The experimental results obtained from both test rigs have shown good agreement with the theoretical analysis. There have been observed small but consistent differences between the two test rigs regarding the spray penetration and cone angle, and thus an analysis of the possible causes for these differences has also been included.