The Effects of Port Water Injection on Spark Ignition Engine Performance and Emissions Fueled by Pure Gasoline, E5 and E10

Farhad Salek,Seyed Vahid Hosseini,Maria Dolores Redel-Macias,Meisam Babaie,Martin L Burby,Ali Zare,Ali Ghodsi,Amir Nourian

doi:10.3390/pr8101214

Farhad Salek, Seyed Vahid Hosseini + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/pr8101214

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Abstract

It has been proven that vehicle emissions such as oxides of nitrogen (NOx) are negatively affecting the health of human beings as well as the environment. In addition, it was recently highlighted that air pollution may result in people being more vulnerable to the deadly COVID-19 virus. The use of biofuels such as E5 and E10 as alternatives of gasoline fuel have been recommended by different researchers. In this paper, the impacts of port injection of water to a spark ignition engine fueled by gasoline, E5 and E10 on its performance and NOx production have been investigated. The experimental work was undertaken using a KIA Cerato engine and the results were used to validate an AVL BOOST model. To develop the numerical analysis, design of experiment (DOE) method was employed. The results showed that by increasing the ethanol fraction in gasoline/ethanol blend, the brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) improved between 2.3% and 4.5%. However, the level of NOx increased between 22% to 48%. With port injection of water up to 8%, there was up to 1% increase in engine power whereas NOx and BSFC were reduced by 8% and 1%, respectively. The impacts of simultaneous changing of the start of combustion (SOC) and water injection rate on engine power and NOx production was also investigated. It was found that the NOx concentration is very sensitive to SOC variation.

Highlights

Vehicle emissions are one of the main concerns around the world from both environmental and health perspectives
The range of the design variables (SOC, water injection ratio and ethanol volume fraction) were defined in the AVL design explorer and engine output parameters were calculated at engine rated speed
The general equation format which was developed for each engine output parameter by regression analysis is shown below: Response = cte + (a × start of combustion (SOC)) + (b × m fe ) + (c × water injection ratio (WIR)) + (d × SOC × m fe )+

Summary

Introduction

Vehicle emissions are one of the main concerns around the world from both environmental and health perspectives. Researchers have reported a link between air pollution and increased death rates from the Corona virus [4,5]. Due to such detrimental effects, authorities and researchers around the world are developing measures that can mitigate the adverse effects of using fossil fuels for internal combustion (IC) engines. One of the solutions is to use alternative renewable fuels instead of fossil fuels. In IC engines, biofuels extracted from different renewable sources can be added into the fossil fuels at various percentages to provide a fuel mixture, the thermo-physical properties of which are better than pure gasoline. One advantage of biofuels such as E5 is that they can be produced from renewable energy sources such as food waste through thermal processes [8,9,10,11,12]

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