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Small natural gas cogeneration engines frequently operate with lean mixture and late ignition timing to comply with NOx emission standards. Late combustion phasing is the consequence, leading to significant losses in engine efficiency. When substituting a part of the excess air with exhaust gas, heat capacity increases, thus reducing NOx emissions. Combustion phasing can be advanced, resulting in a thermodynamically more favourable heat release without increasing NOx but improving engine efficiency. In this work, the effect of replacing a part of excess air with exhaust gas was investigated first in a constant volume combustion chamber. It enabled to analyse the influence of the exhaust gas under motionless initial conditions for several relative air-fuel ratios (λ = 1.3 to 1.7). Starting from the initial value of λ, the amount of CH4 was maintained constant as a part of the excess air was replaced by exhaust gas.

Small-scale cogeneration units (Pel < 50 kW) frequently use lean mixture and late ignition timing to comply with current NOx emission limits. Future tightened NOx limits might still be met by means of increased dilution, though both indicated and brake efficiency drop due to further retarded combustion phasing and reduced brake power. As an alternative, when changing the combustion process from lean burn to stoichiometric, a three-way-catalyst allows for a significant reduction of NOx emissions. Combustion timing can be advanced, resulting in enhanced heat release and thus increased engine efficiency. Based on this approach, this work presents the development of a stoichiometric combustion process for a small naturally aspirated single cylinder gas engine (Pel = 5.5 kW) originally operated with lean mixture. To ensure low NOx emissions, a three-way-catalyst is used.

Operating an Otto-Engine with hydrogen as fuel the probability of combustion anomalies like knocking, pre-ignition and backfiring increases significantly. Knocking is strongly dependent on the operating point, while the cause for preignition is still investigated. Literature as well as preliminary investigations to this work suggest that especially the spark plug has a significant influence on the occurrence of preignition and backfiring. Hence, the scope of this paper is to identify and understand the influence of the spark plug on preignition in order to reduce their occurrence and receive more mechanical power from the engine. In the first step, the operating conditions leading to preignition and backfiring are determined experimentally using a naturally aspirated single cylinder gas engine and a state-of-the-art prechamber spark plug.

The concept of hot surface assisted compression ignition (HSACI) was previously shown to allow for control of combustion timing and to enable combustion beyond the limits of pure homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion. This work investigates the potential of HSACI to extend the operating limits of a naturally aspirated single-cylinder natural gas fueled HCCI engine. A zero-dimensional (0D) thermo-kinetic modeling framework was set up and coupled with the chemical reaction mechanism AramcoMech 1.3. The results of the 0D study show that reasonable ignition timings in the range 0-12°CA after top dead center (TDC) in HCCI can be expressed by constant volume ignition delays at TDC conditions of 9-15°CA. Simulations featuring the two-stage combustion in HSACI point out the capability of the initial heat release as a means to shorten bulk-gas ignition delay.