A Study on Nozzle Flow and Spray Characteristics of Piezo Injector for Next Generation High Response Injection

Most diesel injector, which is currently used in high-pressure common rail fuel injection system of diesel engine, is driven by the solenoid coil energy for its needle movement. The main disadvantage of this solenoid-driven injector is a high power consumption, high power loss through solenoid coil and relatively fixed needle response’s problem. In this study, a prototype piezo-driven injector, as a new injector mechanism driven by piezoelectric energy based on the concept of inverse piezo-electric effect, has been designed and fabricated to know the effect of piezo-driven injection processes on the diesel spray structure and internal nozzle flow. Firstly we investigated the spray characteristics in a constant volume chamber pressurized by nitrogen gas using the back diffusion light illumination method for high-speed temporal photography and also analyzed the inside nozzle flow by a fully transient simulation with cavitation model using VOF(volume of fraction) method. The numerical calculation has been performed to simulate the cavitating flow of 3-dimensional real size single hole nozzle along the injection duration. Results were compared between a conventional solenoid-driven injector and piezo-driven injector, both equipped with the same micro-sac multi-hole injection nozzle. The experimental results show that the piezo-driven injector has short injection delay and a faster spray development and produces higher injection velocity than the solenoid-driven injector. And the predicted simulation results with the degree of cavitation’s generation inside nozzle for faster needle response in a piezo-driven injector were reflected to spray development in agreement with the experimental spray images.