Coupling effect of thermal conducting and low-temperature reaction process on ignition characteristics under diesel-like conditions

The typical behavior of misfiring after low-temperature ignition (LTI) in the cold-start of a diesel engine is mainly caused by thermo-kinetic imbalance and is related to the coupling effect of thermal conducting and low-temperature chemistry. This paper abstractly constructed a two-zone model to characterize such a diesel-like operating condition and investigated the coupling effect of thermal conducting and low-temperature chemistry on ignition characteristics mechanistically. The results show that at relatively low temperature/equivalence ratio environments, thermal conducting has a stronger effect on the ignition process and acts mainly on the chemical reaction rate rather than the reaction pathway. At lower temperature environments (600 K–700 K), the two zones' temperature trajectories almost overlap before LTI. At a higher temperature (700 K–800 K), thermal conducting and low-temperature reactions together affect the ignition process, causing the lower-temperature zone to earlier translate from LTI to high-temperature ignition (HTI), in contrast to the situation without thermal conducting. Thermal conducting induced by fuel-concentration gradient has an effect after the LTI of richer zones, which causes the HTI to delay, but for the leaner zone, it increases the low-temperature reaction rates sharply and advances the ignition. This study provides theoretical support to overcome the unstable ignition problem of cold-start.