Investigating the reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion strategy in a natural gas/diesel fueled engine with a pre-chamber

•A novel combustion strategy, RCCI with a pre-chamber, is proposed and investigated.•The proposed strategy extends the RCCI operating range to use less intake air temperatures.•The new concept extends the RCCI operating range to use lower portions of the active fuel.•The proposed strategy is sensitive to engine load and is more efficient for high loads. Reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) concept has been proven to be a promising combustion mode for the next generations of internal combustion engines. This strategy is still subject of extensive studies to overcome its operational limitations. In the present work, the effect of using a pre-chamber to extend some operating ranges in a RCCI engine is investigated using coupled multidimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms. To accomplish this, the combustion and flow field in a single cylinder engine with a pre-chamber, working in RCCI mode and fueled with natural gas/diesel are numerically modeled. Experimental data is used to validate the simulation results and then, combustion characteristics and engine emissions in some various operating regions, in terms of initial temperature, fuel equivalence ratio and portions of the two fuels are discussed. The results reveal that the proposed strategy provides the ability to extend the engine operating ranges to use lower intake temperatures, even to 50K lower for some cases, and also using a larger portion of natural gas instead of diesel fuel. On the other hand, the new strategy could result in incomplete combustion and formation of related emissions in low loads, but for higher engine loads it shows better combustion characteristics.