Automobiles continue to rely on internal combustion engines (ICEs). As fuel characteristics change, improving ICE efficiency is critical to consumer needs. Understanding how turbulence affects the efficiency helps researchers design better engines. This visualization shows the turbulent motion of air inside the cylinder of a piston-engine.  Of particular interest are the high cycle-to-cycle variations (CCV), especially near complex geometric features like spark-plugs, which are caused by large-scale variations in flow structures and multi-physical phenomena that affect performance.

Science: Argonne National Laboratory: Saumil Patel, Muhsin Ameen, and Sicong Wu GE Global Research: Tanmoy Chatterjee (formerly Argonne National Laboratory)

Visualization: Ina Murphy, Hal Brynteson, Joseph A. Insley, Argonne National Laboratory, and Northern Illinois University

This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.