Motivation and Background

Using green hydrogen in an internal combustion engine holds the potential to mitigate all hydro-carbon emissions, but is still plagued by NOx formation. Several strategies against NOx formation are available for spark-ignited engines (ultra-lean burning, dilution, etc) and iscurrently investigated by RSM. Utilizing premixed, port fuel, or direct-injected hydrogen, airfuel mixing and its impact on flame-propagation is of main interest.

The RSM engine is optically-accessible from the piston, as well from the liner. This enables the use of advanced laser diagnostics, such as tracer-LIF. As hydrogen and the air ambient are very inefficiently fluorescent, tracer (i.e., acetone, anisole, toluene, SO2) is evaporated into the air or fuel stream. Earlier experiments have shown that similar fuel concentration results to Rayleigh scattering are possible with tracer-LIF [1].

There are challenges (low SNR and signal levels, reflecting backgrounds) involved in such a harsh and complex environment, but high-speed imaging of LIF has been successfully performed in the RSM optical engine in the past [2,3].

Tasks

• Setting up laser diagnostics and cameras
• Experimental plan
• Performing measurements
• Post-processing using Davis and Matlab/Python
• Result analysis
• Report writing