Combustion Pressure Characteristics in an Ethanol Blended Gasoline Dual Spark Plug Internal Combustion Engine
Author(s):
Suresh Shetty, Shrinivasa Rao B.R
Affiliation(s):
Mechanical Engineering Department, N.M.A.M.Institute of Technology, Nitte
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A Spark ignition engine (SI) suffers considerably from cycle-by-cycle fluctuations. Minimizing these variations is one of the most important goals so as to improve the power output, fuel economy, engine emission level and hence drivability. In this experimental work, the cycle-by-cycle variation of combustion pressure parameters such as indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP), maximum cylinder pressure (Pmax) and maximum rate of pressure rise (dP/dθ)max for ethanol blended gasoline dual spark plug SI engine were investigated. The experiment was conducted on a single cylinder water cooled four stroke dual plug SI engine at a constant speed of 1800rpm and 240-240 bTDC ignition timings. Three loading conditions (60%, 80% and 100% of full load), five different ethanol fractions ( 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% ethanol by volume), and three compression ratios ( 8:1, 9:1 and 10:1) were represented as an variables in operating conditions of the engine. The results of the research work showed that coefficient of variation (COV) of IMEP less than 5%, Pmax less than 10% and (dP/dθ) max exceeds 10% for almost all the test conditions. Hence it can be concluded that COV of (dP/dθ) max becomes a critical parameter to define the combustion range of ethanol blended gasoline dual spark plug SI engine.