Ronald Grover from General Motors
In this video from the HPC User Forum in Detroit, Ronald Grover from GM presents: Use of HPC to Drive Advanced More Fuel-Efficient Engines.
The downside to diesel engines is that they produce more emissions, like soot and nitrogen oxides, than gasoline engines because of how they combust fuel and air. A gasoline engine uses a spark plug to ignite a fuel-air mixture. A diesel engine compresses air until it is hot enough to ignite diesel fuel sprayed into the cylinder, using more air than necessary to burn all the fuel in a process called lean mixing-controlled combustion.
We can generally clean up emissions for a gasoline engine with a three-way catalyst,” said Ronald Grover, staff researcher at General Motors (GM) Research and Development. “The problem with diesel is that when you operate lean, you can’t use the conventional three-way catalysts to clean up all the emissions suitably, so you have to add a lot of complexity to the after-treatment system.”
That complexity makes diesel engines heavier and more expensive upfront.
Ronald Grover and GM colleagues Jian Gao, Venkatesh Gopalakrishnan, and Ramachandra Diwakar are using the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to improve combustion models for diesel passenger car engines with an ultimate goal of accelerating innovative engine designs while meeting strict emissions standards.
Request the paper: A Computational Approach to Predict External Spray Characteristics for Flashing and Cavitating Nozzles from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324948285_A_Computational_Approach_to_Predict_External_Spray_Characteristics_for_Flashing_and_Cavitating_Nozzles [accessed Sep 20 2018].
The next HPC User Forum takes place Oct. 1-2, 2018 in Stuttgart, Germany.
