Investigation of bifurcations in cyclic combustion dynamics of a CNG-diesel RCCI engine.

• Nonlinear dynamical and chaotic methods used investigate the cyclic combustion dynamics of RCCI engine. • Symbol sequence analysis, return maps, recurrence plots (RPs), RQA, and 0–1 test used for analysis. • The dominance of deterministic characteristics are found in the cyclic combustion dynamics at advanced SOI timings. • Laminarity is found to be the most robust RQA parameter to investigate any qualitative changes in combustion dynamics. • The onset of RCCI combustion mode is accompanied by the onset of a noisy period-2 bifurcation. This study uses nonlinear dynamical and chaotic methods to investigate the cyclic combustion dynamics of a CNG-Diesel reactivity control compression ignition (RCCI) engine. The experiments of RCCI combustion mode are conducted on a single-cylinder automotive diesel engine with the development ECU. Low reactivity fuel (i.e., CNG) is injected into the intake manifold, and high reactivity fuel (i.e., diesel) is injected directly into the engine cylinder during the RCCI experiments. Mass of fuel injection per cycle and their injection events are controlled by using ECU. The engine is tested for fixed engine load and speed of 3 bar BMEP and 1500 rpm, respectively. A double diesel injection strategy is used for injecting the diesel fuel into the engine cylinder. In-cylinder pressure is measured using a piezoelectric pressure transducer on a crank angle basis with a resolution of 0.1 CAD. Combustion parameters are calculated on a cyclic basis from measured in-cylinder pressure. In this study, the effect of diesel injection timing (SOI-2) on the behavior of combustion dynamics for two different masses of port-injected CNG fuel (m c) is investigated. The CA50 time series of 1000 consecutive engine cycles is analyzed for combustion dynamics analysis using symbol sequence analysis, return maps, recurrence plots (RPs), recurrence quantitative analysis (RQA), and 0–1 test. The peaks in symbol sequence histograms and the corresponding symbol series depict the period-2 nature of the cyclic combustion dynamics at the intermediate SOI-2 of 30° and 40° bTDC. Return maps also confirm the onset of noisy period-2 bifurcation at 30° bTDC SOI-2. The dominance of deterministic period-2 characteristics is found in the cyclic combustion dynamics at 30° and 40° bTDC SOI-2 using recurrence plots. The 0–1 test method depicts stronger chaotic cyclic combustion dynamics at 20° and 50° bTDC SOI-2. In summary, the present study supports the existence of a periodic window in between the chaotic combustion for the intermediate values of SOI-2. The dominance of the deterministic characteristics makes this regime of intermediate SOI-2 values suitable for a better cycle resolved control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]