Sandia Natl Labs develops a simple modification that greatly reduces soot emissions

[kjclow]

Not saying it won't work but it almost sounds like the hype of the 100 mpg carbs.

[Lightflyer1]

Did that hype come from Sandia National Labs?

It should give the emissions a much much easier job. With soot being reduced 50-100% and NOx dropping a lot as well, they would have to work a lot less. DPF regens at 1k mile increments instead of 200 miles?

[woofie2]

With Sandia's research aimed at larger diesel engines, I suspect applications in shipping, generators and locomotive systems as their money point. it will take Bosio or someone to build a smaller engine injector on this design.

Likely 2-3 years until anyone goes to mass production on the new injectors, my guess is that there will need to be some redesign on engines from CAT, GE, Bosch, etc to incorporate this new injector.

[alext91]

Wow, Drummond Biles was one of my TAs in college! Really cool to see his name on this!

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[SilverGhost]

Well, the piston bowl is mainly there to work with injector spray to promote fuel/air mixing. The ducted injector removes this need. Without the bowl the piston can stop further from head or head can have a pocket.

Not an easy retrofit, but 'simple' change during design stage.

Jason

[casioqv]

I think the TDI or other small direct injection engines should be simple to retrofit in this manner, by putting the ducts inside the existing piston bowl. It would essentially be just a new injector nozzle with an extra part, that will require removal of the head. The new nozzles will have six machined jets instead of a circular spray, and exposed threads on the bottom. After installing the injectors with the head removed, you could screw on a fan shaped six-way duct designed to fit neatly into the stock bowl.

Further improvements could be had with an entirely new piston, machined in a 'starburst' pattern to have a spot for each duct.



Overall it's pretty shocking that something this simple works so much better than the highly optimized current approach.

[GoFaster]

For sure any proposed modification like this would have to be designed in tandem with revising the shape of the piston top. The trouble on smaller engines is that the injector is surrounded by valves (and a glow plug tip) and there is not much real estate to work with.

The photo in the opening shot of the article shows this device in somebody's fingertips ... the whole deal looks to be (guess) 20mm across, and looks really intricate ... those socket-head screws are really really small. But there isn't that much real estate available on an automotive cylinder head. It would have to be even smaller.

Unless ... you re-think the way the injector sprays, and build something that achieves this function directly into the cylinder head itself.

[DPM]

I'm wondering if you could build it into the injector- instead of minimising the tip of the nozzle, give it lots of mass then "core" a ring out axially and drill a larger outer hole and then the smaller EDM'd injection hole concentrically for each hole..

[Dannyboy]

I remember seeing the paper on this back in 2017, interesting read but like what Go-faster said it's going to be difficult to engineer a duct into a relatively small area that will effectively work, going to have to completely redesign the head and piston bowl to accommodate it. With electrification rolling out at VW , no point spending money on something that's going to be obsolete in the near future. If VW wasn't caught with their pants down back in 2015 , they very well may have had the time and money to develop this. They are beginning to distance themselves from diesel now