Search Results

Particulate matter emissions are becoming a big issue for GDI engines as the emission regulations being more stringent. Methanol has been considered to be an important alternative fuel to reduce soot emissions. To understand the effect of methanol addition on soot and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) formation, the 2-D distributions of soot volume fraction and different size PAHs relative concentrations in methanol/gasoline laminar diffusion flames were measured by TC-LII and PLIF techniques. The effect of methanol was investigated under the conditions of the same carbon flow and the same flame height. The methanol volume fraction was set as M0/20/40/60/80. The results showed that the natural luminescent flame lift-off height and soot lift-off height increases consistently with the increasing methanol content due to the increase of outlet velocity of fuel vapor.

Bio-butanol has been widely investigated as a promising alternative fuel. However, the main issues preventing the industrial-scale production of butanol is its relatively low production efficiency and high cost of production. Acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE), the intermediate product in the ABE fermentation process for producing bio-butanol, has attracted a lot of interest as an alternative fuel because it not only preserves the advantages of oxygenated fuels, but also lowers the cost of fuel recovery for individual component during fermentation. If ABE could be directly used for clean combustion, the separation costs would be eliminated which save an enormous amount of time and money in the production chain of bio-butanol.

Bio-butanol has been considered as a promising alternative fuel for internal combustion engines due to its advantageous physicochemical properties. However, the further development of bio-butanol is inhibited by its high recovery cost and low production efficiency. Hence, the goal of this study is to evaluate two upstream products from different fermentation processes of bio-butanol, namely acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) and isopropanol-butanol-ethanol (IBE), as alternative fuels for diesel. The experimental comparison is conducted on a single-cylinder and common-rail diesel engine under various main injection timings (MIT) and equivalent engine load (EEL) conditions. The experimental results show that ABE and IBE significantly affect the combustion phasing. The start of combustion (SOC) is retarded when ABE and IBE are mixed with diesel. Furthermore, the ABE/IBE-diesel blends are more sensitive to the changes in MIT compared with that of pure diesel.

Soot emission, known as PM (particulate matter), is becoming a big issue for GDI engines as the emission regulations being increasingly stricter. It is found that ethanol, as an oxygenated bio-fuel, can reduce the soot emission when added to gasoline. In order to fully understand the effect of ethanol on soot reducing, the soot characteristics of ethanol/gasoline blends were studied on laminar diffusion flames. In this experiment, the blending ratio of ethanol/gasoline was set as E0/20/40/60/80. Considering the carbon content decreasing due to ethanol addition, carbon mass flow rate was remained constant. The two-dimensional distributions of soot volume fraction were measured quantitatively by using two-color laser induced incandescence technique. The results showed that ethanol is able to decrease the soot significantly, but the effect of ethanol on soot reduction is weakened with the increasing ethanol ratio.