LITERATURE REVIEW

In the past few years, energy and its environmental impacts are very serious
concerns about the human life on the globe. High rates of energy consumptions,
increasing greenhouse effect, continuous decrease in fossil fuel reserves, have drawn
the attention of researchers all over the world to cope with ever increasing problems to
human kind. The uses of alternative fuels are also at high importance. Current energy
production depends heavily on fossil fuels resources including petroleum, coal and
natural gas (NG). Even with rapid increase in the use of alternative and renewable
energy resources, totally replacing fossil fuel in the foreseen future seems impossible.
However, with efficient use of cleaner fuels, the issues of energy security and
environmental pollution can be partially solved.
Energy utilization in the world can be divided into two major sectors, 1) as power
supply to industry, for daily use from mobile phones to huge metropolitan cities, 2) for
transportation from automobiles to airplanes. Petroleum consumption for automobiles is
used vastly but carbon dioxide, carbon mono oxide and NOx emission has become
major concern about the life sustainability. However the recent research regarding
alternative fuels has shown considerable decrease in environmental impact. Natural gas
(NG) utilization in automobiles has been in focus due to reduced emission.
The use of gases fuels with natural gas (mainly CH 4) in internal combustion
engines (ICE) have proven many advantages over conventional fuels in reducing
pollutant emissions and increasing thermal efficiency as a results of low hydrogen-tocarbon ratio (H/C), lean burn strategies and stratified charge operation [1-5]. With
natural gas (NG), engine can be operated at high compression ratio up to 15:1 which
allows higher thermal efficiency [12]. The combination of high compression ratio, lean
burn mixture and high exhaust gas recirculation, the performance of NG engine can
outperform gasoline and diesel in power and torque [1]. Another advantage using
gaseous fuel is the elimination of oil contamination by unburned fuel during cold
operation, which extends lubrication oil change interval and increases engine life [6].
Early developments of NG-powered engine are mainly focused on fuel system using
mixer, manifold and port fuel injections. These engines are either converted from

gasoline or diesel operations in dual-fuel mode, or run in bi-fuel mode. Recent

development has seen direct fuel injection of NG gaining more interest. Further
improvement of NG engine by mean of hydrogen enrichment has proven to help
improve engine performance and emission further.
One of the major problems when engine is converted to NG in carburetor or port
fuel injection systems, power is reduced and upper speed is limited. These are due to
reduced volumetric efficiency since air is displaced in the intake manifold. In addition,
methane flame speed is about 0.1-0.2 m/s slower than the one of gasoline and diesel
[7, 8]. To overcome this, many techniques have been proposed. One is to use direct fuel
injection, where volumetric efficiency is increased by injecting fuel after intake valve
closes. Moreover turbulence intensity is induced by high speed gas jet [5]. It also allows
unthrottled operation that will reduce pumping loss, and fuel stratification for lean
mixture operation.
Another significant method is to mix NG with hydrogen at certain fraction. The
flame speed of hydrogen is about 6 times faster than the one of methane, and will
hasten the burning process [8]. This also increases the H/C ratio of the mixed fuel and
therefore, results in less CO2 emission per unit of energy produced thereby reducing the
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve thermal efficiency [9]. Various effects
from the combustion of hydrogen and natural gas mixtures were carefully studied by
number of researchers. Many engine performance studies using mixtures of hydrogen
and methane in various ratios of hydrogen volume were carried out in engine [10,14,
15]. Cycle-to-cycle variations of combustion characteristics in a spark ignition engine
using mixtures of 12- 40% by hydrogen volume and natural gas were studied in detail
[11]. To optimize engine operations, a number of engine modification need to be done.
This includes modification to the injection strategies, materials coating of combustion
chamber walls, coating to valve seats and cooling systems [13].
Turbocharging has been identified as another solution for reduced power gas engine.
Ma et al. investigated the effects of turbo charged CNG engine, discovered many
advantages in term of increased output power, and reduced emission and flame
development [16]. The use of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) with CNG engine were

investigated and has positive impacts on reducing NOx emission, lowering combustion
temperature and decreasing combustion variation [14,16]. Natural gas directinjection (DI) with diesel pilot ignition using stratified combustion concept
has been considered as a challenging and innovative technology to improve
engine efficiency and meet stringent emission limits. Due to stratified
mixture usually formed by late injection near the top dead center, the jet
pressure ratio (PR) between injection pressure and motored in-cylinder
pressure is usually very low, which may lead to poor jet mixing efficiency. In
the present study, wall impingement was used to enhance the mixing
process of low PR pulsed jet (PR<10). The flow structure and turbulent
mixing was studied using acetone-based planar laser-induced fluorescence
(PLIF) technique [17].
Different nozzle diameter and pressure ratios have been investigated to
understand the effect of inlet condition of gaseous injector and dedicated
correlation of CNGSIDI injector. Both numerical effort and experiment have
been done to understand the behavior of this type of injector [18]. Natural
gas combustion with pilot ignition has been performed on a 2.8 L fourcylinder to investigate the effects of natural gas injection timing on engine
combustion performance and emissions. The pilot injection parameters (pilot
injection timing and pressure) and natural gas injection pressure have been
studied at a constant speed of 1600 rpm [19].
Most of the works described above deals with engine performance and emission
from engine testing separately from imaging of in cylinder occurrence. The lack of indepth understanding on the in-cylinder flow, mixture formation and flame propagation
with respect to performance and emission require more investigation. This project will fill
this gap by concentrating on modeling & simulation using AVL Boost and AVL FIRE
software and verified engine testing. Flow visualization can be obtained and discussed
with respect to the computed engine performance. The outcome will be highly beneficial
for energy and environmental sectors worldwide.

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