Effect of piston shape design on the scavenging performance and mixture preparation in a two-stroke boosted uniflow scavenged direct injection gasoline engine

Compared to a four-stroke engine, the two-stroke engine doubles firing frequency and has favourable power-to-weight or power-to-volume ratio as well as engine downsizing to improve the overall powertrain fuel economy. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional cross-flow or loop scavenged two-stroke engines, a two-stroke boosted uniflow scavenged direct injection gasoline engine was designed and its performance was analysed. In this study, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations were performed to understand the impact of the piston shape design on the scavenging process, in-cylinder flow formation, turbulence level and subsequent fuel/air mixing process in the boosted uniflow scavenged direct injection gasoline engine. Both single injection and split injection strategies were investigated to study the interactions between piston designs and fuel injection strategies to achieve stoichiometric mixture around the spark plug. The results show that the optimised piston with the same opening timing for all scavenge ports could achieve much better scavenging performance than the baseline piston design. In particular, the shallow pistons, that is, Piston #1 and Piston #4, could produce stoichiometric mixture around the spark plug with relatively lower inhomogeneity and higher turbulence kinetic energy around top dead centre when implementing the split injection strategy with start of injection timing at 250/310 °CA.