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Natural Gas engines are viewed as an alternative to diesel power in the quest to reduce heavy duty vehicle emissions in polluted urban areas. In particular, it is acknowledged that natural gas has the potential to reduce the inventory of particulate matter, and this has encouraged the use of natural gas engines in transit bus applications. Extensive data on natural gas and diesel bus emissions have been gathered using two Transportable Heavy Duty Vehicle Emissions Testing Laboratories, that employ chassis dynamometers to simulate bus inertia and road load. Most of the natural gas buses tested prior to 1997 were powered by Cummins L-10 engines, which were lean-burn and employed a mechanical mixer for fuel introduction. The Central Business District (CBD) cycle was used as the test schedule.

A novel engine concept, currently under study, addresses many of the problems commonly associated with conventional internal combustion engines. In its simplest form the novel engine consists of a single crankshaft operating both a piston compressor and a piston expander which are connected by a continuous flame combustion chamber. One might regard this as a Brayton piston engine which is similar to a previous engine investigated by Warren. Also, due to the use of piston cylinders as the compression and expansion devices, this engine varies little mechanically from current engine technology thus allowing for easy implementation. The main improvement from conventional engine design is that the expansion cylinder can have a larger displacement than that of the compression cylinder. This allows more power to be extracted by lowering the loss due to blowdown and this will increase the thermal efficiency.

With the implementation of a closed loop fuel control system, operation of lean-burn natural gas engines can be optimized in terms of reducing emissions while maximizing efficiency. Such a system would compensate for variations in fuel composition, but also would correct for variations in volumetric efficiency due to immediate engine history and long-term engine component wear. Present day engine controllers perform well when they are operated with the same gas composition for which they were calibrated, but because fuel composition varies geographically as well as seasonally, some method of compensation is required. A closed loop control system on a medium-duty lean-burn engine will enhance performance by maintaining the desired air-fuel ratio to eliminate any unwanted rich or lean excursions (relative to the desired air-fuel ratio) that produce excess engine-out emissions. Such a system can also guard against internal engine damage due to overheating and/or engine knock.

A bi-fuel engine with the ability to run optimally on both compressed natural gas (CNG) and gasoline is being developed. Such bi-fuel automotive engines are necessary to bridge the gap between gasoline and natural gas as an alternative fuel while natural gas fueling stations are not yet common enough to make a dedicated natural gas vehicle practical. As an example of modern progressive engine design, a Saturn 1.9 liter 4-cylinder dual overhead cam (DOHC) engine has been selected as a base powerplant for this development. Many previous natural gas conversions have made compromises in engine control strategies, including mapped open-loop methods, or resorting to translating the signals to or from the original controller. The engine control system described here, however, employs adaptive closed-loop control, optimizing fuel delivery and spark timing for both fuels.

The Rand-Cam engine is a positive displacement machine, operating on a four stroke cycle, which consists of a rotor with multiple axial vanes forming combustion chambers as the rotor and vanes rotate in a cam shaped housing. The cam housing, consisting of two “half-housings” or stators, contains a toroidal trough of varying depth machined into each stator. The two stators are phased so that the shallowest point on one trough corresponds to the deepest on the other. A set of six vanes, able to move axially through machined holes in the rotor, traverses the troughs creating six captured zones per side. These zones vary in volume with rotor rotation. Since each trough has two deep sections and two shallow sections with ramps in between, full four stroke operation is obtained between each pair of vanes in each trough, corresponding to twelve power “strokes” per revolution.

The Rand Cam engine is a novel design which avoids the use of pistons in favor of a cavity of varying size and shape. A set of vanes protrudes from a rotor into a circular trough in a stator. The vanes seal to the walls and base of the trough, which is of varying depth, and progress around the trough with rotation of the rotor. These vanes therefore pass through the rotor and are constrained to move parallel to the rotational axis. Intake and exhaust processes occur through ports in the stator wall which are revealed by the passing vanes. Advantages of the basic design include an absence of valves, reduction in reciprocating masses, presence of an integral flywheel in the rotor and strong fluid movement akin a swirl induced by the relative velocity between the rotor and stator.

The federal emission standards for heavy duty vehicle engines require the exhaust emissions to be measured and calculated in unit form as grams per break horse-power-hour (g/bhp-hr). Correct emission results not only depend on the precise emission measurement but also rely on the correct determination of vehicle energy consumption. A Transportable Heavy-Duty Vehicle Emission Testing Laboratory (THDVETL) designed and constructed at West Virginia University provides accurate vehicle emissions measurements in grams over a test cycle. This paper contributes a method for measuring the energy consumption (bhp-hr) over the test cycle by a chassis dynamometer. Comparisons of analytical and experimental results show that an acceptable agreement is reached and that the THDVETL provides accurate responses as the vehicle is operated under transient loads and speeds. This testing laboratory will have particular value in comparing the behavior of vehicles operating on alternative fuels.