Title: A numerical analysis of the air flow through the IC engine intake manifold

Authors: Artur Cebula; Piotr Świątek; Sebastian Kowalczyk

Addresses: Institute of Thermal Power Engineering, Cracow University of Technology, Al. Jana Pawla II 35, 31-864, Krakow, Poland ' Faculty of Machines and Transportation, Poznan University of Technology, Ul. Piotrowo 3, 60-965 Poznań, Poland ' Ensys SC, Sliwiny 37, 83-110 Tczew, Poland

Abstract: Engine intake systems should be carefully designed to provide a uniform flow to all cylinders. The current note presents the initial phase of the redesign process of an intake manifold of a four cylinder aircraft IC engine. By means of computational fluid dynamics analysis, the deficiency of the initial design in splitting the air flow among the runners is discovered, and an improvement of the original design is proposed. It is shown that a significant improvement in the flow distribution can be achieved by an appropriately installed guide vane, whereas the flow split is observed to be very sensitive to the geometry of the guide vane, necessitating a very careful design.

Keywords: intake manifold; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; combustion engines; flow split.

DOI: 10.1504/PCFD.2019.097608

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal, 2019 Vol.19 No.1, pp.63 - 68

Received: 18 May 2017
Accepted: 23 Apr 2018
Published online: 31 Jan 2019 *

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