Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Diesel Fuel Atomization Characteristics of a Piezo Injection System

The purpose of this study was to determine the characteristics of the fuel spray, injected through a piezo injection system, and to compare the experimental and numerical results to that obtained using a solenoid injection system. In order to investigate the effect of a fuel injection system and spray angle on fuel spray performance such as fuel injection profile, evolution of fuel spray, and atomization characteristics, different nozzle-driven systems with the same nozzle specifications were used. For the numerical approaches, a modified nozzle flow model and a breakup model was applied to the simulation of spray atomization using the same calculated conditions as the experiments. It was found that the piezo injection system rapidly reaches the peak injection rate and had uniform injection profiles. The experimental and calculated spray tip penetration of both injection systems showed good agreement as the ambient pressure increased. The microscopic atomization characteristics of the high-pressure piezo injection system indicated that the outstanding injection performance of the piezo injector promoted droplet atomization