The Effect Of Hydrogen On Performance And Emissions Of A Methanol Engine

The increasing environmental pollution and reduction in conventional fuel reserves led the alternative fuel technologies to get the attention of researchers around the world.Most car manufacturers prefer using the existing vehicle engines to operate on alternative fuels rather than manufacturing new engine technologies for future cars.Alcohols and hydrogen provide a solution to this increasing necessity.Methanol fuel is not only advantageous in increasing the performance of gasoline engine and decreasing the emissions but it also prevents the need of any modification in existing engines.Hydrogen on the other hand provides clean as well as fast combustion capabilities to methanol fuel.Addition of hydrogen enhances the performance of methanol engine and decreases harmful emissions at exhaust.This research experimentally investigates the performance and emission characteristics of a 4% hydrogen blended methanol dual-fuel engine under various operating conditions such as different excess air ratios and engine speeds.The effects of 4% hydrogen blending on performance(thermal efficiency,specific fuel consumption,mean effective pressure and exhaust gas temperature)and emissions(THC,NOx and CO)are compared with pure methanol engine.This thesis gives an insight to the existing dual fuel technologies with focus on hydrogen enriched fuels.It then introduces a brief detail of fuel supply system design used for dual fuel application.Furthermore,a detailed mathematical modeling of engine performance parameters is given.A well defined methodology and experimentation techniques used for this research are also described in this thesis.The experimental results are then analyzed with a technical approach and compared in terms of graphs and bar charts.In the end,reasonable conclusions are drawn from the experimentation results and analysis.It was found that when hydrogen is added in methanol fuel,the engine's thermal efficiency can be improved and the emissions can be decreased.