This paper summarizes the findings involved in the development of producer gas fuelled reciprocating engines over a time frame of six years. The high octane rating, ultra clean, and lowenergy density producer gas derived from biomass has been examined. Development efforts are aimed at a fundamental level, wherein the parametric effects of the compression ratio and ignition timing on the power output are studied. These findings are subsequently applied in the adaptation of commercially available gas engines at two different power levels and make. Design of a producer gas carburettor also formed a part of this developmental activity. The successful operations with producer gas fuel have opened possibilities for adapting a commercially available gas engine for large-scale power generation application, albeit with a loss of power to an extent of 20-30 per cent. This loss in power is compensated to a much larger extent by the way toxic emissions are reduced; these technologies generate smaller amounts of toxic gases (low NO x and almost zero SO x ), being zero for greenhouse gas (GHG).
A 20 kW reciprocating engine is operated using producer gas derived from a modern open top downdraft re-burn biomass gasifier that has been evaluated by rigorous laboratory performance testing over several hundred hours. The engine is operated at varying compression ratio (CR) from 11.5 to 17.0 and ignition timings from 30 to 6° before Top Centre (TC). The engine – alternator system is characterised for its performance by the simultaneous measurement of gas and airflow rates, gas composition (on-line), emission levels and power delivered. It is also instrumented to obtain the in-cylinder behaviour in the form of pressure-crank angle (p – θ) diagram to assess the thermodynamic behaviour of the engine. Three-dimensional (3-D) simulation of the flow field in the combustion chamber (involving piston-bowl arrangement) through the cycle up to the start of the combustion is used to obtain inputs on the turbulence intensity (u′) and length scale (lT) for the modelling of the flame propagation process in a zero-dimensional model (0-D) designed to predict the p – θ curve. The flame propagation and heat release processes make use of eddy entrainment and laminar burn-up model. The data on u′ extracted from the 3-D flow calculations match reasonably well with experiments till compression stroke but are in contradiction with trends close to TC. This is reasoned to be due to limitation of the k-ε model to capture transient effects due to reverse squish phenomenon. The 0-D model took into account the experimental behaviour of the u′ in the post-TC period to attempt to match the observed p – θ data over a range of CRs and ignition timing advances. While these predictions match well with the experimental data at advanced ignition timing at both higher and lower CRs, the peak pressure is under-predicted at lower ignition advances; reason are traced to increase in flame area and propagation speed due to reverse squish effect. When these are accounted in the model, the p – θ curves are predicted better.
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