Knock is the most crucial limitation in attaining the peak load required at high efficiency in heavy duty (HD) spark ignition (SI) engines. Renewable fuels such as ethanol and methanol have high resistance to autoignition and can help overcome this limitation. To reduce knock and improve efficiency further, dilution can be used to add specific heat capacity and reduce combustion temperature. This work studied diluted combustion and knock characteristics of gasoline, ethanol, and methanol on a HD SI single cylinder engine for a wide load range. Ethanol and methanol displayed excellent knock resistance which allowed a peak gross IMEP of 25.1 and 26.8 bar respectively, compared to gasoline which only reached 8.3 bar at [Formula: see text]1.4 with a compression ratio of 13. Over 18% increase in gross IMEP was possible for gasoline and ethanol when increasing air excess ratio from 1 to 1.4. Methanol achieved the target gross IMEP at [Formula: see text]1 and required no spark retard at [Formula: see text]1.6. A peak indicated efficiency above 48% was recorded for ethanol and methanol at [Formula: see text]1.6 and gross IMEP of approximately 21 bar. At part loads, stable operation was possible until [Formula: see text]1.8 for all fuels. Increase in intake temperature showed a marginal improvement in stability but no increase in lean limit. The concept shows promise as diluted combustion of ethanol and methanol reduced knock and achieved diesel baseline load. With optimization, there is potential to improve efficiency further and possible cost savings compared to commercial diesel engines.

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The negative impact of transport on climate has led to incentives to increase the amount of renewable fuels used in internal combustion engines (ICEs). Oxygenated, liquid biofuels are promising alternatives, as they exhibit similar combustion behaviour to gasoline. In this article, the effect of the different biofuels on engine efficiency, combustion propagation and emissions of a gasoline-optimised direct injected spark ignited (DISI) engine were evaluated through engine experiments. The experiments were performed without any engine hardware modifications. The investigated fuels are gasoline, four alcohols (methanol, ethanol, n-butanol and iso-butanol) and one ether (MTBE). All fuels were tested at two speed sweeps at low and mid load conditions, and a spark timing sweep at low load conditions. The oxygenated biofuels exhibit increased efficiencies, even at non-knock-limited conditions. At lower loads, the oxygenated fuels decrease CO, HC and NOx emissions. However, at mid load conditions, decreased volatility of the alcohols leads to increased emissions due to fuel impingement effects. Methanol exhibited the highest efficiencies and significantly increased burn rates compared to the other fuels. Gasoline exhibited the lowest level of PN and PM emissions. N-butanol and iso-butanol show significantly increased levels of particle emissions compared to the other fuels.

The utilisation of internal combustion engines is one of the main causes of particle emissions in urban areas. As the interest for the utilisation of biofuels increases, it is important to understand their effect on particle number emissions. In this paper, the particle size distribution and the particle number emissions from a gasoline-optimised direct-injected spark-ignited (DISI) engine are investigated. The effects of five different biofuel alternatives on these emissions were evaluated and compared to gasoline. The utilisation of the high-resolution, high-temperature ELPI+ enabled undiluted measurements of the particle size distribution down to 6 nm, without extensive cooling of the engine exhaust. Contrary to other studies, the results show that the particle number emissions for the three measured cut-off sizes (23, 10 and 7 nm) increased with the utilisation of oxygenated biofuels. The results indicate that the decreased volatility and energy density of the alcohols has a more significant impact on the particle formation in a DISI engine than the increased oxygen content of these fuels.