Combustion visualisation in large bore gas engines

Optical diagnostics are different techniques to image combustion and are applied to a variety of types of combustion today. Everything from stationary flames in burners to really challenging applications like combustion inside the cylinder of an internal combustion engine, where the combustion takes place within a couple of milliseconds.

Today optical diagnostics is a standard research tool in combustion engine development of small internal combustion engines, like passenger car and truck size engines. However, in large bore engines with cylinder bore diameters above 200 mm optical investigations are fairly rare, especially regarding gas engines, and consequently detailed information about the combustion is missing.

The optical investigations of the combustion would support, in-parallel on-going, combustion simulation efforts done by CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and validate the models used. The tests would be done on a test engine with a cylinder bore of 340 mm. Large bore gas engines are today getting more and more important as a solution for distributed, environmental friendly, power production with high efficiency, i.e. low CO2, for both land based power plants and ship propulsion.