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The goal of the present work was to analyze the performance of a spark ignition engine fueled by ethanol steam reforming products. The highest reformer-ICE system efficiency and the lowest CO emissions were achieved with the ethanol steam reforming products obtained at reaction temperature of 1000K and water/ethanol ratio of 1.8. Fueling the SI engine with reformate gas made it possible to achieve the reformer-ICE system efficiency of 40% for the engine fed by SRE products compared with 34% for gasoline and 36% for ethanol. CO emissions were reduced by 3.5 and 10 times compared with ethanol and gasoline, respectively. NO emissions were decreased by about 4 times compared with the gasoline-fed engine.

A simple, relatively short and inexpensive screening test method has been developed for evaluation of available detergent/dispersant diesel fuel additives. The screening test is based on experiments of running a laboratory diesel engine in a pre-determined regime(load cycle). The engine is a single cylinder, 4-stroke DI, naturally aspirated and air cooled. It is coupled to a generator feeding electrical heaters as the load. The test rig is controlled electronically to enable fully automatic test bench operation, including start/stop, load change, emergency shut-down, etc. The experiments were performed by running the engine on a reference base fuel and then the same fuel with different detergent additives. The nozzle of the fuel injector was checked for clogging by air flow measurements, using the ISO-4010 test rig.

This study investigates the particle engine emission characteristics including particle-bound metals for different lubricants used in a direct injection (DI) engine fed with the hydrogen-rich reformate containing 75% mol. H2 and 25% mol. CO2. The particle number concentration, size distribution and content of trace metals in the emitted particles are measured, analyzed, and compared for the baseline gasoline-fed engine and the reformate-fed engine. The results show that for all tested lubricants the particle number and mass emission from the reformate-fueled engine are significantly higher than from the baseline gasoline-fed counterpart. Also, an ICP analysis performed on PM demonstrated that the content of trace elements from the lubricant are higher for the reformate fuel. This indicates that an excessive lubricant involvement in combustion is the reason of these findings.