Optical diagnostics and direct injection of liquid fuel sprays

The research described here addresses the problem of a paucity of high quality data on the full field structure of high pressure liquid fuel sprays for gasoline direct injection, GDI, engines. The paper describes the application of phase Doppler anemometry, PDA, and single-shot laser sheet Mie imaging to the study of GDI sprays and discusses the methodologies adopted for the experimental systems and the optimisation of the techniques. Experimental data is presented which defines the spray structure in terms of PDA vector and scalar fields and single-shot CCD digital images. The work demonstrates the essential complementary nature of the single point and planar optical diagnostics for spray studies.