The utilization of hydrogen in hydrogen/diesel dual fuel engine

Abstract

A hydrogen fueled internal combustion engine has great advantages on exhaust emissions including carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in comparison with a conventional engine fueling fossil fuel. In addition, if it is compared with a hydrogen fuel cell, the hydrogen engine has some advantages on price, power density, and required purity of hydrogen. Therefore, they expect that hydrogen will be utilized for several applications, especially for a combined heat and power (CHP) system which currently uses diesel or natural gas as a fuel.A final goal of this study is to develop combustion technologies of hydrogen in an internal combustion engine with high efficiency and clean emission. This study especially focuses on a diesel dual fuel (DDF) combustion technology. The DDF combustion technology uses two different fuels. One of them is diesel fuel, and the other one is hydrogen in this study. Because the DDF engine is not customized for hydrogen which has significant flammability, it is concerned that serious problems occur in the hydrogen DDF engine such as abnormal combustion, worse emission and thermal efficiency.In this study, a single cylinder diesel engine is used with gas injectors at an intake port to evaluate performance swung the hydrogen DDF engine with changing conditions of amount of hydrogen injected, engine speed, and engine loads. The engine experiments show that the hydrogen DDF operation could achieve higher thermal efficiency than a conventional diesel operation at relatively high engine load conditions. However, it is also shown that pre-ignition with relatively high input energy fraction of hydrogen occurred before diesel fuel injection and its ignition. Therefore, such abnormal combustion limited amount of hydrogen injected. Fire-deck temperature was measured to investigate causal relationship between fire-deck temperature and occurrence of pre-ignition with changing operative conditions of the hydrogen DDF engine.