CFD study of the Effect of Piston Crevice Volume on the Temperature Distribution in a Rapid Compression Machine

One of the conditions for controlling the aerodynamics in the reaction chamber is designing a crevice volume on the surface of the piston head. The importance of the crevice volume is to contain the cool boundary layers generated as a resulting of the moving reactor piston. However, this crevice volume consequently drops the end gas pressure and temperature at the end of the stroke. The CFD study of the aerodynamic effect of a piston movement in a reaction chamber was modelled using the commercial code of Ansys Fluent and assuming a 2-Dimensional computational moving mesh. A starting optimal crevice volume of 282 mm3 was used for further optimisation. This resulted in five crevice lengths of 3 mm, 5 mm, 7 mm, 9 mm and 12 mm, respectively. The crevice height of 5 mm was found to improve the compressed gas pressure at the end of the stroke to about 2 bar and temperature about 17.7 K and also maintained a uniform temperature field, while that of 12 mm had the least peak compressed gas pressure. This study investigated the possible means of improving the peak pressure and temperature drop in a rapid compression machine by further optimisation of the crevice volume.