Search Results

Butanol, which is a renewable biofuel, has been regarded as a promising alternative fuel for internal combustion engines. When blended with diesel and applied to pilot ignited natural gas engines, butanol has the capability to achieve lower emissions without sacrifice on thermal efficiency. However, high blend ratio of butanol is limited by its longer ignition delay caused by the higher latent heat and higher octane number, which restricts the improvement of emission characteristics. In this paper, the potential of increasing butanol blend ratio by adding hot exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is investigated. 3D CFD model based on a detailed kinetic mechanism was built and validated by experimental results of natural gas engine ignited by diesel/butanol blends. The effects of hot EGR is then revealed by the simulation results of the combustion process, heat release traces and also the emissions under different diesel/butanol blend ratios.

Alcohols, because of their potential to be produced from renewable sources and their characteristics suitable for clean combustion, are considered potential fuels which can be blended with fossil-based gasoline for use in internal combustion engines. As such, n-butanol has received a lot of attention in this regard and has shown to be a possible alternative to pure gasoline. The main issue preventing butanol's use in modern engines is its relatively high cost of production. Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) fermentation is one of the major methods to produce bio-butanol. The goal of this study is to investigate the combustion characteristics of the intermediate product in butanol production, namely ABE, and hence evaluate its potential as an alternative fuel. Acetone, n-butanol and ethanol were blended in a 3:6:1 volume ratio and then splash blended with pure ethanol-free gasoline with volumetric ratios of 0%, 20%, 40% to create various fuel blends.

In the present study, we developed a reduced chemical reaction mechanism consisted of n-heptane and toluene as surrogate fuel species for diesel engine combustion simulation. The LLNL detailed chemical kinetic mechanism for n-heptane was chosen as the base mechanism. A multi-technique reduction methodology was applied, which included directed relation graph with error propagation and sensitivity analysis (DRGEPSA), non-essential reaction elimination, reaction pathway analysis, sensitivity analysis, and reaction rate adjustment. In a similar fashion, a reduced toluene mechanism was also developed. The reduced n-heptane and toluene mechanisms were then combined to form a diesel surrogate mechanism, which consisted of 158 species and 468 reactions. Extensive validations were conducted for the present mechanism with experimental ignition delay in shock tubes and laminar flame speeds under various pressures, temperatures and equivalence ratios related to engine conditions.

With the development of advanced ABE fermentation technology, the volumetric percentage of acetone, butanol and ethanol in the bio-solvents can be precisely controlled. To seek for an optimized volumetric ratio for ABE-diesel blends, the previous work in our team has experimentally investigated and analyzed the combustion features of ABE-diesel blends with different volumetric ratio (A: B: E: 6:3:1; 3:6:1; 0:10:0, vol. %) in a constant volume chamber. It was found that an increased amount of acetone would lead to a significant advancement of combustion phasing whereas butanol would compensate the advancing effect. Both spray dynamic and chemistry reaction dynamic are of great importance in explaining the unique combustion characteristic of ABE-diesel blend. In this study, a semi-detailed chemical mechanism is constructed and used to model ABE-diesel spray combustion in a constant volume chamber.

Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE), an intermediate product in the ABE fermentation process for producing bio-butanol, is considered a promising alternative fuel because it not only preserves the advantages of oxygenated fuel which typically emit less pollutants compared to conventional diesel, but also lowers the cost of fuel recovery for each individual component during the fermentation. With the development of advanced ABE fermentation technology, the volumetric percentage of acetone, butanol and ethanol in the bio-solvents can be precisely controlled. In this respect, it is desirable to estimate the performance of different ABE blends to determine the best blend and optimize the production process accordingly. ABE fuels with different component ratio, (A: B: E: 6:3:1; 3:6:1; 0:10:0, vol. %), were blended with diesel and tested in a constant volume chamber.

In order to comply with the stringent emission regulations, many researchers have been focusing on diesel-compressed natural gas (CNG) dual fuel operation in compression ignition (CI) engines. The diesel-CNG dual fuel operation mode has the potential to reduce both the soot and NOx emissions; however, the thermal efficiency is generally lower than that of the pure diesel operation, especially under the low and medium load conditions. The current experimental work investigates the potential of using diesel-1-butanol blends as the pilot fuel to improve the engine performance and emissions. Fuel blends of B0 (pure diesel), B10 (90% diesel and 10% 1-butanol by volume) and B20 (80% diesel and 20% 1-butanol) with 70% CNG substitution were compared based on an equivalent input energy at an engine speed of 1200 RPM. The results indicated that the diesel-1-butanol pilot fuel can lead to a more homogeneous mixture due to the longer ignition delay.

Dual-fuel combustion combining a premixed charge of compressed natural gas (CNG) and a pilot injection of diesel fuel offer the potential to reduce diesel fuel consumption and drastically reduce soot emissions. In this study, dual-fuel combustion using methane ignited with a pilot injection of No. 2 diesel fuel, was studied in a single cylinder diesel engine with optical access. Experiments were performed at a CNG substitution rate of 70% CNG (based on energy) over a wide range of equivalence ratios of the premixed charge, as well as different diesel injection strategies (single and double injection). A color high-speed camera was used in order to identify and distinguish between lean-premixed methane combustion and diffusion combustion in dual-fuel combustion. The effect of multiple diesel injections is also investigated optically as a means to enhance flame propagation towards the center of the combustion chamber.

The modeling of fuel jet atomization is key in the characterization of Internal Combustion (IC) engines, and 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a recognized tool to provide insights for design and control purposes. Multi-hole injectors with counter-bored nozzle are the standard for Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) applications and the Spray-G injector from the Engine Combustion Network (ECN) is considered the reference for numerical studies, thanks to the availability of extensive experimental data. In this work, the behavior of the Spray-G injector is simulated in a constant volume chamber, ranging from sub-cooled (nominal G) to flashing conditions (G2), validating the models on Diffused Back Illumination and Phase Doppler Anemometry data collected in vaporizing inert conditions.

Recent research has shown that butanol, instead of ethanol, has the potential of introducing a more suitable blend in diesel engines. This is because butanol has properties similar to current transportation fuels in comparison to ethanol. However, the main downside is the high cost of the butanol production process. Acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) is an intermediate product of the fermentation process of butanol production. By eliminating the separation and purification processes, using ABE directly in diesel blends has the potential of greatly decreasing the overall cost for fuel production. This could lead to a vast commercial use of ABE-diesel blends on the market. Much research has been done in the past five years concerning spray and combustion processes of both neat ABE and ABE-diesel mixtures. Additionally, different compositions of ABE mixtures had been characterized with a similar experimental approach.

Butanol has proved to be a very promising alternative fuel in recent years. The production of bio-butanol, typically done using the acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation process is expensive and consumes a lot of energy. Hence it is of interest to study the intermediate fermentation product, i.e. water-containing ABE as a potential fuel. The combustion and emissions performance of ABE29.5W0.5 (29.5 vol.% ABE, 0.5 vol.% water and gasoline blend), ABE30 (30 vol.% ABE and gasoline blend) and ABE0 (pure gasoline) were investigated in this study. The results showed that ABE29.5W0.5 enhanced engine torque by 9.6%-12.7% and brake thermal efficiency (BTE) by 5.2%-11.6% compared to pure gasoline, respectively. ABE29.5W0.5 also showed similar brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) relative to pure gasoline.

Ethanol is the most widely used renewable fuel in the world now. Compared to ethanol, butanol is another very promising renewable fuel for internal combustion engines. It is less corrosive, and has higher energy density, lower vapor pressure and lower solubility in water. However, the use of Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE), an intermediate product in ABE fermentation, presents a cost advantage over ethanol and butanol and has attracted much attention recently. In this study, three high-alcohol-content gasoline blends (85% vol. of ethanol, butanol and ABE, referred as E85, B85 and ABE85, respectively) were investigated in a port-injection spark-ignition engine. ABE has a component ratio of 3:6:1. In addition, pure gasoline was also tested as a baseline for comparison. All fuels were tested under the same conditions (1200 RPM, Φ = 0.83−1.25, BMEP = 3 bar).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) blended with diesel without further component recovery which has high costs blocking the industrial-scale production of bio-butanol. The combustion characteristics of ABE and diesel blends were studied in a constant volume chamber. In this study, 50% and 80% vol. ABE (without water) were mixed with diesel and the vol. % of acetone, butanol and ethanol were kept at 30%, 60% and 10% respectively. The in-cylinder pressure was recorded using a pressure transducer and the time-resolved natural luminosity was captured by high speed imaging. Combustion visualization using laser diagnostics would provide crucial fundamental information of the fuel's combustion characteristics. With the different percentage of the ABE blended in the diesel, the soot oxidation, the ignition delay and the soot lift-off length were studied in this work.

Due to the increasing consumption of fossil fuels, alternative fuels in internal combustion engines have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Ethanol is the most common alternative fuel used in spark ignition (SI) engines due to its advantages of biodegradability, positively impacting emissions reduction as well as octane number improvement. Meanwhile, acetone is well-known as one of the industrial waste solvents for synthetic fibers and most plastic materials. In comparison to ethanol, acetone has a number of more desirable properties for being a viable alternative fuel such as its higher energy density, heating value and volatility.

Methanol has been regarded as a potential transportation fuel due to its advanced combustion characteristics and flexible source. However, it is suffering from misfire and high HC emissions problems under cold start and low load conditions either on methanol SI engine or on methanol/diesel dual fuel engine. Hydrogen is a potential addition that can enhance the combustion of methanol due to its high flammability and combustion stability. In the current work, the effect of hydrogen fraction on the laminar flame characteristics of methanol- hydrogen-air mixture under varied equivalence ratio was investigated on a constant volume combustion chamber system coupled with a schlieren setup. Experiments were performed over a wide range of equivalence ratio of the premixed charge, varied from 0.8 to 1.4, as well as different hydrogen fraction, 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% (n/n). All tests were carried out at fixed temperature and pressure of 400K and 0.1MPa.

CNG-diesel dual fuel combustion mode has been regarded as a practical operation strategy because it not only can remain high thermal efficiency but also make full use of an alternative fuel, natural gas. However, it is suffering from misfire and high HC emissions under cold start and low load conditions. As known, hydrogen has high flammability. Thus, a certain proportion of hydrogen can be added in the natural gas (named HCNG) to improve combustion performance. In this work, the effect of hydrogen volume ratio on combustion characteristics was investigated on an optically accessible single-cylinder CNG-diesel engine using a Phantom v7.3 color camera. HCNG was compressed into the tank under different hydrogen volume ratios varied from 0% to 30%, while the energy substitution rate of` HCNG remained at 70%.

Biodiesel is considered one of the most promising alternative fuels to petrol fuels. In this study, an attempt has been made to investigate and compare the effect of fuel injection pressure, injection timing, and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) ratio on the particle size distributions and exhaust emissions of the diesel and biodiesel produced from waste cooking oil (WCO) used in a common rail direct injection (CRDI) diesel engine. The engine tests were conducted at two injection pressures (800 and 1600 bar), two injection timings (25 and 5 deg before top dead center (bTDC) and three EGR ratios (10%, 20% 30%) at a constant fuel injection energy per stroke and engine speed (1200 r/min). The results indicated that carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbon (HC) emissions of biodiesel were slightly lower, but nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions were slightly higher, than those of diesel fuel under most operating conditions.

HTL is a kind of biodiesel converted from wet biowaste via hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), which has drawn increasing attention in recent years due to its wide range of raw materials (algae, swine manure, and food processing waste). However, from the previous experiments done in a constant volume chamber, it was observed that the presence of 20% of HTL in the blend produced as much soot as pure diesel at in chamber environment oxygen ratio of 21%, and even more soot at low oxygen ratios. It was also observed that n-butanol addition could reduce the soot emission of diesel significantly under all tested conditions. In this work, the spray and combustion characteristics of HTL and diesel blends with n-butanol added were investigated in a constant volume chamber. The in-chamber temperature and oxygen ranged from 800 to 1200 K and 21% to 13%, respectively, covering both conventional and low-temperature combustion (LTC) regimes.

An optically accessible single-cylinder high-speed direct-injection (HSDI) diesel engine equipped with a Bosch common rail injection system was used to study effects of injection pressures on the in-cylinder spray and combustion processes. An injector with an injection angle of 70 degrees and European low sulfur diesel fuel (cetane number 54) were used in the work. The operating load was 2.0 bar IMEP with no EGR added in the intake. The in-cylinder pressure was measured and the heat release rate was calculated. High-speed Mie-scattering technique was employed to visualize the liquid distribution and evolution. High-speed combustion video was also captured for all the studied cases using the same frame rate. NOx emissions were measured in the exhaust pipe. The experimental results indicated that for all of the conditions the heat release rate was dominated by a premixed combustion pattern. Two-stage low temperature reaction was seen for early injection timings.

An experimental investigation was conducted using a Ford single-cylinder spark-ignition research engine to compare the performance and emissions of neat n-butanol fuel to that of gasoline and ethanol. Measurements of brake torque and exhaust gas temperature along with in-cylinder pressure traces were used to study the performance of the engine and measurements of emissions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide ere used to compare the three fuels in terms of combustion byproducts. It was found that gasoline and butanol are closest in engine performance with butanol producing slightly less brake torque. Exhaust gas temperature and nitrogen oxide measurements show that butanol combusts at a lower peak temperature. Of particular interest were the emissions of unburned hydrocarbons which were between two and three times those of gasoline suggesting that butanol is not atomizing as effectively as gasoline and ethanol.

The performance and emission of an AVL 5402 single-cylinder engine fueled with acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) / diesel blends were experimentally investigated at various load conditions and injection timings. The fuels tested in the experiments were ABE10 (10% ABE, 90% diesel), ABE20 and diesel as baseline. Thermodynamics analyses of pressure traces acquired in experiments were performed to show the impact of ABE concentration to the overall combustion characteristics of the fuel mixtures. Cumulative heat release analysis showed that ABE mixtures generally retarded the overall combustion phasing, ignition delays of ABE-containing fuels were significantly extended, however, combustion rate during CA10∼CA50 were accelerated at different extent. Pressure rise rate of ABE-containing fuels further implicated that the premixed combustion were more dominant than that of diesel. Polytropic indices of both expansion and compression strokes were calculated from p-V diagram.