Experimental study of hydrous ethanol gasoline blend (E10) in a four stroke port fuel-injected spark ignition engine

Abstract

SUMMARY Performance, emissions and combustion characteristics of a port‐injected engine fuelled with hydrous ethanol gasoline blend (E10 ‐ 10% of hydrous ethanol by volume in gasoline) were compared with gasoline operation. Hydrous ethanol blend produced higher power output with lean mixtures at part throttle condition. Higher flame velocity and wider flammability limits of the blend resulted in lower cycle‐by‐cycle variations in indicated mean effective pressure as compared to gasoline. Hydro carbon emission was also lower due to the oxygen available in the fuel (E10), which enhanced the combustion rate. Higher latent heat of evaporation of the ethanol blend and water present in it resulted in lower in‐cylinder temperature, which in turn led to lesser NOx emissions. Thermal efficiency with the blend was higher in the leaner operating conditions than gasoline. Not much difference in performance, emission and combustion characteristics between neat gasoline and E10 were observed at full throttle operation. On the whole, hydrous ethanol blends can be used as a fuel with good performance and low emissions at part load condition. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Particulate Matter and Gaseous Emission of Hydrous Ethanol Gasoline Blends Fuel in a Port Injection Gasoline Engine

“…The NO x emissions are decreased by 9.58%, 33.05%, and 7.09% on average for HE10, HE20, and E20, respectively. The outcomes obtained are consistent with the NO x results stated in previous publications [11,12,14,22,[24][25][26][27].…”

“…Furthermore, hydrous ethanol fuel has oxygen content in it, which encourages combustion efficiency and decreases emissions of HC. The results achieved are in line with previous publications recorded in [12][13][14]17,19,25,29]. Compared with HE20, E20 indicated slightly lower HC emissions at low engine load conditions due to the best volatility of anhydrous ethanol fuel, leading to an enhancement of the air-fuel mixing, and thereby promoting combustion and encouraging the oxidization of HC.…”

“…Many empirical reports have investigated the appropriateness of alcohols in general [7][8][9][10] and hydrous ethanol in particular as fuels for internal combustion engines. Readers may refer to our review paper for further details [3], which concludes, as briefly discussed here, that mixing hydrous ethanol in gasoline yields an increase in combustion efficiency [11,12], cylinder pressure [11,[13][14][15], heat release rate [13], engine torque [12,[16][17][18][19][20], engine power [11,12,[16][17][18][19][20], engine thermal efficiency [12,17,18,21,22], brake mean effective pressure [11,17,18,23], and fuel consumption [11,16,17,19,20]. On the other hand, it decreases nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions [11,12,14,22,[24][25]…”

Spark Ignition Engine Combustion, Performance and Emission Products from Hydrous Ethanol and Its Blends with Gasoline

“…The fuel consumption was higher for HE40 due to the zero heating value of water. Venugopal et al [67] found that for the lean combustion limit, hydrous ethanol gasoline blends performed better in terms of a lower COV of IMEP due to its larger flammability limit at part throttle operation compared to the use of gasoline. Furthermore, with lean mixtures at part throttle operation adapted for a port-injected engine fueled with 10% hydrous ethanol (containing 8.33% water by volume) gasoline blends produced a higher torque and power output compared with gasoline operation.…”

“…In addition, at low speed and low load conditions, the increased water content in ethanol fuel blends lead to reduce the peak cylinder pressure [68]. While, adding hydrous ethanol fuel to gasoline for use in SI engines slightly increases the engine torque [8,36,50,67,70,71], engine power [6,8,36,50,67,70,71], engine thermal efficiency [10,36,42,67,71], and brake mean effective pressure [6,36,71]. Clearly, Costa et al [71] reported that increasing compression ratio slightly decreases SFC for hydrous ethanol compared to use of gasoline.…”