Suya Gao

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The main objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive model for spray atomization under the consideration of flash boiling, which includes nucleation, bubble growth, and droplet breakup. Although flash boiling has been previously studied, there is still no well-established analytical and numerical model of their mechanisms, or general guid...

Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of different alcohol additives on the combustion and emission characteristics of a diesel engine. Diesel was blended with four higher alcohols (propanol, butanol, pentanol, and hexanol) with a blend ratio of 40% by volume. To evaluate the engine performance at different engine loads, four loads...

The main purpose of this work is to conduct detailed comparisons of spray behavior among four important components of gasoline and to investigate the effects of fuel properties and aerodynamic breakup on spray behavior under flash boiling conditions. Isooctane, hexane, pentane, and ethanol were used as test fuels. Pressure ratio (Rp) was used as an...

Due to their excellent fuel properties, butanol and hexanol are considered as two promising renewable fuels for diesel engine applications. The objective of this work is to investigate and compare the spray and combustion characteristics of butanol-diesel and hexanol-diesel blends under high-altitude conditions. A constant volume combustion chamber...

Due to the expansion of the global population and rapid economic growth, human activities at high-altitude regions are expected to grow. However, diesel engines are the main power sources for heavy-duty machinery, which can experience low combustion efficiency and high emissions due to the reduction of intake air mass. Adopting oxygenated fuels, su...

This work investigated the behaviors of single-component and multi-component sprays under different flash boiling intensities. Isooctane, hexane, ethanol, isooctane-hexane, and isooctane-ethanol mixtures were used as test fuels. The pressure ratio of the ambient pressure over saturation pressure (Rp) was used as the indicator of the superheated deg...

A significant number of landmasses on earth are above sea level where the ambient pressure is below 1 atm. With economy and population growth, the rapid expansion of human activities at these high-altitude regions is expected. However, the research on diesel engine combustion and emissions under low intake pressure conditions are limited, especiall...

The main objective of this study is to understand the effect of fuel properties on flash boiling sprays using multi-hole injectors. Macroscopic characteristics were investigated using Diffused Backlight Imaging (DBI) and quantified with liquid penetration length and spray angles. Phase Doppler Anemometry (PDA) was applied to measure the droplet siz...

Bio-butanol has been widely investigated as a promising alternative fuel. However, the main issues preventing industrial-scale production of butanol are its relatively low production efficiency and high cost of component recovery from the acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation process. Therefore, ABE has attracted a lot of interest as an altern...

The gasoline direct-injection compression-ignition (GDCI) combustion strategy is studied in this work based on the numerically constructed ignition phase curves. Previous research has shown that for GDCI operation, the engine efficiency can reach as high as that of diesel engines yet the NOx and soot emissions can be reduced simultaneously. A compa...