Development and assessment of a cleaner locomotive powering system with alternative fuels

Abstract

Transportation research is critical in every domain of the transportation sector, including the rail sector. For sustainable rail transportation, alternative/cleaner powering options are badly needed which can only be possible with cleaner fuels. This paper presents a proposed hybrid combined engine system consisting of a gas turbine and a molten carbonate fuel cell combined with an internal combustion engine. The proposed system uses ecofriendly fuels in order to increase the engine performance and reduce carbon emissions. The hybrid combined engine is modeled using Aspen Plus and is thermodynamically analyzed. The alternative fuels chosen for this study are hydrogen, methanol, ethanol, and dimethyl ether. It was found that the proposed powering system can produce 4200 kW, which is doubled the power of the internal combustion engine, with 43% and 55% thermal and exergetic efficiencies, respectively. The cooling load of the absorption refrigeration system varies from 442 kW to 615 kW with maximum energetic and exergetic co-efficient of performances of 18.29% and 9.54%, respectively. The CO2 emissions dropped by more than 60% using alternative fuels. In addition, parametric studies are conducted in the operating pressure of the molten carbonate fuel cell (MCFC) and gas turbine (GT). The best performance can be fulfilled at 200 kPa for the MCFC and 900 kPa for the GT. Therefore, the hybrid combined engine can provide high power with less CO2 emissions and high performance.