Gasoline Fuel Injector Spray Measurement and Characterization - A New SAE J2715 Recommended Practice

With increasingly stringent emissions regulations and concurrent requirements for enhanced engine thermal efficiency, a comprehensive characterization of the automotive gasoline fuel spray has become essential. The acquisition of accurate and repeatable spray data is even more critical when a combustion strategy such as gasoline direct injection is to be utilized. Without industry-wide standardization of testing procedures, large variablilities have been experienced in attempts to verify the claimed spray performance values for the Sauter mean diameter, Dv90, tip penetration and cone angle of many types of fuel sprays. A new SAE Recommended Practice document, J2715, has been developed by the SAE Gasoline Fuel Injection Standards Committee (GFISC) and is now available for the measurement and characterization of the fuel sprays from both gasoline direct injection and port fuel injection injectors. A primary motivation for the development of the standardized procedures for test configuration, data acquisition, data reduction and reporting was to achieve significant reductions in the test-to-test and laboratory-to-laboratory variabilities of such reported spray data. All of the major areas of fuel injector spray testing and characterization are addressed in detail in the document, including spray imaging, high-resolution patternation and drop sizing by both phase-Doppler interferometry and laser diffraction. Valuable lessons regarding the definitions and interpretations of commonly-used spray parameters were learned during the development of the J2715 document, and these are presented and discussed. Based upon the five years of committee discussions and consensus decisions, five key recommendations on fuel spray measurement and characterization are made to the worldwide automotive industry. The first, and most important, recommendation is that the Recommended Practices in SAE J2715 be utilized by the spray laboratories of all automotive companies and injector manufacturers in place of the myriad of in-house test protocols that are currently being used. To evaluate and quantify the efficacy of the new Recommended Practices in J2715, a comprehensive program of round-robin spray characterization tests was designed, and is currently being conducted in the spray testing laboratories of six injector manufacturers and end-users worldwide. This two-year testing protocol will be completed in mid-2008 and will compare the results of in-house testing procedures to those obtained using the J2715 procedures. This round-robin test program is described in detail, and an informative example of the initial test results for the direct-injection spray angle and spray-tip penetration is provided and discussed.