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The internal combustion engines, have already, become an indispensable and integral part of our present day life style, particularly in the transportation and agricultural sectors. Unfortunately the survival of these engines has, of late, been threatened due to the problems of fuel crisis and environmental pollution. Therefore, to sustain the present growth rate of civilization, a non-depletable, clean fuel must be expeditiously sought. Hydrogen exactly caters to the specified needs. Hydrogen, even though “Renewable” and “clean burning”, does give rise to some undesirable combustion problems in an engine operation, such as backfire, pre-ignition, knocking and rapid rate of pressure rise. The present investigation compares the performance and emission characteristics of a DI diesel engine with gaseous Hydrogen as a fuel inducted by means of Carburation and Timed Port Injection (TPI) techniques along with diesel as a source of ignition.

Hydrogen is one of the most promising alternate fuels due to its clean burning characteristics and better performance as compared to fossil fuels. In addition to the need for finding effective solutions to the problem of air pollution from combustion processes, increasing pressure is being placed to find alternative fuel to replace the rapidly depleting petroleum fuels. Numerous research works have been carried out on using hydrogen as a fuel in Spark Ignition (SI) engine. However the major drawback of using hydrogen in a SI engine is the reduction in power output of the engine by about 30% in addition to problems like pre ignition, back fire and knocking at higher loads. Hence the use of hydrogen in a SI engine is limited.