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Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is a suitable strategy to optimize heavy duty natural gas (NG) engines. EGR could be utilized to have high specific power, with low thermal stress, but also to increase engine efficiency. NG fuelling permits a large flexibility in EGR system design, due to very clean engine exhaust. In this paper, three types of EGR routes have been studied. The best set up, which can introduce the highest EGR quantities, to provide the best reduction of the thermal load at rated power, was found to be a cooled low pressure EGR route. However high low pressure route (HLPR) could give the possibility to increase engine efficiency by modulating the power output in the widest un-throttled range operation.

The improvement in engines efficiency and reduction of emissions is the permanent aim of engine industry in order to meet European standards regulation. To optimize small internal combustion engines it is necessary to improve the basic knowledge of thermo-fluid dynamic phenomena occurring during the combustion. This paper describes the combustion process in an optically accessible two-stroke spark-ignition engine used in a commercial 43 cm3 chainsaw. Two different feeding systems were tested: standard and CWI one. The engine head was modified in order to allow the visualization of the combustion using endoscopic system coupled with a high spatial resolution ICCD camera. Flame front propagation was evaluated through an image processing procedure. The image visualization and chemiluminence allowed to follow the combustion process from the spark ignition to the exhaust phase at high engine speed. All the optical data were correlated with engine parameters and exhaust emissions.