NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH ON THE DI-CI ENGINE PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS UNDER LPG - DIESEL DUAL FUEL COMBUSTION MODE

Abstract

Properties of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) are suitable as an alternative fuel for internal combustion engines. This work aims to combine both numerical optimization analysis of LPG injector placement angle and subsequent experiment with selected mounting injector angle to investigate the effects of using LPG as a parallel-partial substitute fuel with diesel fuel under dual-fuel combustion mode. An electronic injection fuel control system was applied to the modified intake manifold to generate the appropriate LPG injection. Three mounting angle injector positions including 45⁰, 90⁰ and 135⁰ in the upstream direction of intake air have been defined by Ansys Fluent to take into account efficient LPG-air mixing. Then, the experiment was conducted with LPG-diesel dual-fuel combustion mode (DFC mode) and compared to entirely diesel combustion mode as baseline data. Different load conditions ranging from idle to 4.0 kW were imposed at a constant engine speed of 1700rpm. The obtained results revealed that the injector’s mounting angle position by 45  opposite to the intake air flow showed the correlation with the calculated LPG-air ratio in dual fuel combustion reaction. In DFC mode, the brake thermal efficiency (BTE) decreased on average by 4.6% and the LPG substitution rate gradually decreased while brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC) increased for all engine loads. The exhaust temperature in the dual-fuel combustion mode was found to be higher than that of full diesel fuel mode at low loads (less than 2.5 kW) and began to decrease at higher loads.