Investigating the potential of a higher reactivity fuel to achieve faster heat-up of aftertreatment systems

Shortening the aftertreatment system heat-up period will be crucial to meet upcoming emissions regulations, which mandate significant reductions in tail-pipe emissions for on-road heavy-duty vehicles. This work studies the impact of increasing fuel reactivity on the combustion of post injections during the expansion stroke. The work demonstrates an operating strategy using a blend of di-butyl ether (a potential low-carbon biofuel component) and #2 diesel that achieves higher exhaust enthalpy, while maintaining similar engine-out emissions (NOx and combustion efficiency) in comparison to the baseline #2 diesel fuel (cetane number 41). On average, a 12% increase in exhaust enthalpy was observed for the blend (cetane number 60) relative to the baseline fuel. The ability to operate the higher reactivity fuel at a more retarded post-injection timing, where combustion with #2 diesel was found to be more unstable, and less complete was key to achieving higher exhaust enthalpy. However, a small fuel penalty (∼ 3%–5%) was also associated with the higher reactivity fuel with this operating strategy. The formation of fuel lean regions, due to the long ignition delays at late injection conditions, was predicted to be the leading contributor to the increased emissions of products of partial combustion. Chemical kinetic simulations using surrogates for the fuels used in the experiments, demonstrated the ability of a higher cetane fuel to outperform the baseline fuel under fuel lean conditions with equivalence ratios less than 0.7.