Impact of Hydrous Ethanol-Gasoline Blend with Syngas on NOx Emission in SI Engine

Abstract

The transportation sector is considered as one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, using alternative fuels is a challenging and promising task to meet emissions restrictions and protect the environment. In this chapter, the aim is to conduct a comparatively experimental investigation of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from an internal combustion engine, the engine is fed by gasoline available in the Saudi Arabian market rating octane number (RON 91 and RON 95) with admixtures of syngas with 0% E0, 5% E5 and 10% E10—by volume of anhydrous ethanol —and HE5 and HE10 with water concentrations of 5%, 10%, 30% and 40%—by volume of  hydrous ethanol at the presence of stoichiometric mixture regime, ?=1. An on-board plasma system used to produce syngas (H₂, CO, CO₂) through the partial oxidation of gasoline with air in a plasma-assisted fuel reformer. The syngas injected in a gasoline engine with a fuel injection system modified for operation with addition of some amount of syngas. This study is a continuation of a previous work, where the engine was investigated in terms of the performance and exhaust emissions where the engine was fueled by gasoline RON91/RON95, with an admixture of syngas and 5% by volume pure ethanol (E5) in the presence of different ultra-lean mixture regimes. The experimental results demonstrated a significant total reduction in NOx emissions and slightly increased in fuel consumption when mixing gasoline (RON 91 and RON 95), anhydrous ethanol (E5 and E10) and hydrous ethanol (HE5 and HE10) with syngas. For the use of hydrous ethanol (HE5 and HE10) along with the addition of syngas. For both RON 91 and RON 95, the lowest NOx emissions were found 60% in RON 91 and 72% in RON 95 at hydrous ethanol 40% water concentration. For future work, we plan to investigate the effect of reformer plasmatorch design on syngas yield and composition. We intend to modify the anode and some other parts of the plasmatorch and then evaluate performance of the fuel reforming process using these modified parts. The best feasible configuration and design of the plasmatorch yielding highest hydrogen content in syngas will be used for further operation with our engine test system.