Argonne partnerships to improve fuel injector dynamics

LEMONT - Argonne National Laboratory has expanded a research partnership with the goal of developing more fuel efficient engines.

For the past six years, researchers at the Argonne have collaborated with Cummins, an engine design and manufacturing company, and Convergent Science Inc., a software developer, to create predictive engine simulations using the high-performance computing tools at the laboratory. Now, they're extending their partnership for three more years, and adding new collaborators and capabilities to further speed the research.

Under a new cooperative research agreement, the three organizations, along with the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and California, will work together to build more accurate fuel spray models and integrate them into full engine simulations.

This effort will build on the fuel spray and combustion modeling work the three organizations have done over the past six years, which Cummins has adopted in its own internal workflow.

"The enhanced modeling capability developed in this (agreement) will give industry the tools it needs to design cleaner and more efficient engines," says Kelly Senecal, co-founder of Convergent Science.