Experimental Investigation of Evaporating Spray Macroscopic Characteristics for Gasoline/Diethyl-Ether Blended Fuel

In this research work, the spray macroscopic characteristics of gasoline/diethyl-ether blended fuel were investigated in a constant combustion chamber via schlieren optical setup. Subcritical ambient conditions (0.5 MPa pressure, 349∼516 K temperature) and supercritical condition (3.8 MPa pressure, 516 K temperature) were respectively chose to simulate evaporating spray propagation process. By means of in-house post-processing code, macroscopic characterizing parameters like vapor tip penetration, spray angle and fuel evaporation rate are extracted from raw schlieren images. The results show that under subcritical conditions, blending diethyl-ether into gasoline is prone to enhance fuel evaporation rate at low ambient temperature, while this enhancing effect tends to be mitigated with the increase of ambient temperature. Moreover, when the ambient condition is converted from subcritical state to supercritical state, the evaporating rate of pure diethyl-ether is restrained due to fuel evaporation mechanism.