International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 4, Issue 12, December-2013 986

ISSN 2229-5518

Investigation on Performance and Emission of a Spark Ignition Engine Using Methanol as Fuel Additive.

Biswajit H, Nirmal KS, Guided by Dr. S. Thirumalini, Prof, Department of ME, Amrita School of Engineering

Abstract— Vehicles which had gone vintage suffer a lot of emission and performance related issues. At present these issues can only be compromised by replacing the whole vehicle or retrofitting the engine. Here we have established a low cost method to improve emission and performance characteristics of the engine using methanol blended gasoline as a working fluid. An experimental investigation is carried out to analyze the variation in performance and exhaust emission on a four cylinder, four stroke, spark ignition engine by adding methanol in the rations of 5%, 10%, 15% and benchmarked it against that of using pure gasoline (0% Methanol). The performance characteristics of M10 (10% Methanol) was found satisfactory, which gave maximum performance among all blends. A maximum reduction of 65.13% in HC emission during cold start was observed when 15% Methnol blend was used. And a significant 97.88% reduction in CO was observed at the maximum load. It is also observed that the exhaust temperature has reduced significantly with the addition of methanol thus indicating a possible increase in life of the engine on long run.

Index Terms— Gasoline, Exhaust Emissions, Methanol, Performance, Spark Ignition Engine.

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1 INTRODUCTION

ETHANOL is a clean burning, high octane blending component for gasoline alternative that is made from
Babazadesh et al. [2] nvestigated the effect of oxygenate additives into gasoline for the improvement of physiochemical

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alternative non gasoline energy sources such as natural
gas, coal and biomass. Methaol has properties which make
them burn cleaner in gasoline engines. These properties in-
clude more O2 , high blending octane for smoother burning, a lower boiling temperature for better fuel vapourisation in cold
start engines, high H/C ratio, and no sulphur contamination which can poision the catalytic converter of vehicle.
Perfomance tests were conducted for investigation of fuel consumption, brake thermal efficiency, brake power and brake specific fuel consumption, while exhaust emission were ana- lyzed for CO, CO2 , HC and NO.
M.Alhasan [1] investigated the effect of using unleaded gaso- line-ethanol blends on SI engine performance and exhaust emis- sion. A four stroke, four cylinder SI engine (type TOYOTA, TERCEL-3A) was used for conducting this study. Performance tests were conducted foe equivalence air-fuel ratio, fuel con- sumption, volumetric efficiency, brake thermal efficiency, brake power, engine torque and brake specific fuel consumption, while exhaust emissions were analyzed for carbon monox- ide(CO), carbon dioxide(CO2) and unburned hydrocar- bons(HC). Using unleaded gasoline-ethanol blends with differ- ent percentages of fuel at three-fourth throttle opening position and variable engine speed ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 rpm. The results showed that blending unleaded gasoline with ethanol increases the brake power, torque, volumetric and brake ther- mal efficiencies and fuel consumption, while it decreases the brake specific fuel consumption and equivalence air-fuel ratio. The CO and HC emission concentrations in the engine exhaust decrease, while the CO2 concentration increases. The 20 vol. % ethanol in fuel blend gave the best results for all measured pa- rameters at all engine speeds.
properties of blends. Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether (MTBE),
Methanol, Tertiary Butyl Alcohol (TBA), and Tertiary amyl
alcohol (TAA) blend into unleaded gasoline with various
blended rates 2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%. Physio-
chemical properties of blends are analyzed by the standard
American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) methods.
Methanol, TBA, and TAA increases density of the mixture, but MTBE decreases density. The Reid vapor pressure (RVP) of the gasoline is found to increase with the addition of the oxy- genated compounds. All oxygenates improve both motor and
research octane numbers. Among these four additives, TBA
shows the best fuel properties.

2 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

2.1 Setup


A four stroke, four cylinder SI engine connected to the electric dynamometer was used for the study. The experimental set was as shown in Fig 1.
Fig 1

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200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

0 1 2 3 4 5

petrol

M 5

M 10

M 15

International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 4, Issue 12, December-2013 988

ISSN 2229-5518


Variation in exhaust gas temperature with increase in loads for different additive blend was as shown in Fig 4. The ex- haust gas temperature when methanol was used along with gasoline was lower than that of gasoline. 5% methanol blend showed minimum exhaust gas teemperature, there was no significant difference in variation for 10% and 15% methanol blends. Thus lower exhaust gas temperature indicates a possi- ble increase in the life of the engine on a long run.

3.2 Variation in Exhaust Emissions



Fig 7. : CO/CO2 (%) VS Brake Power (kW) using 5% Methanol
Fig. 5: Carbon MonoxideI“CO”(%J) VS Brake PSower (kW) ER
Variation in the CO emission with different additive-fuel
blends and loads was as shown in Fig 5. As the percentage of
additive increased CO emission was reduced. This was clearly

due to cleaner combustion of methanol-blended gasoline. The higher oxygen content in oxygenate additives supports a cleaner combustion, also the CO will be oxidized in a large extent to CO2 .

CO2 , CO Trade off with different blends

Fig. 6: CO/CO2 (%) VS Brake Power (kW) using 0% Methanol
Fig. 8: CO/CO2 (%) VS Brake Power(kW) using 10% Methanol
Fig. 9: CO/CO2 (%) VS Brake Power (kW) using 15% Metha- nol
This CO2 /CO trade offs as shown (Fig 6, Fig 7, Fig 8, and Fig
9) can be attributed towards the high Oxygen content of meth-

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 4, Issue 12, December-2013 989

ISSN 2229-5518

anol. The excess oxygen helps in the oxidation of CO to CO2 .

Fig. 10: Nitrogen Monoxide”NO” (ppm) VS Brake Power

nol) was found higher in compare with other methanol blends and 100% gasoline. Regarding emission characteristics, the major observations were, drastic reduction (65.13%) in HC emission during cold start of engine, and reduction (97.88%) in CO emission when the load was high. From the result it is ev- ident that methanol-blended gasoline can be a good substitute as a fuel for vintage engines.
Presence of Oxygen gives a more desirable combustion characteristics resulting into low emission of CO, HC and higher emission of CO2 as a result of complete combustion [3].

5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We H. Biswajit and KS. Nirmal are pursuing M.Tech in the Au- tomotive Engineering department in the Amrita School of Engi- neering, Amrita Vshwa Vidyapeetham. We would like to thank Dr.S Thirumalini, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engi- neering, Amrita School of Engineering for her encouragement, motivatio and for guiding us to write this paper.

(kW)

REFERENCES

(1)

Variation observed in the NO emission (ppm) at different loads with different additive-fuel blends is shown in Fig 10. NO emission level increased with increase in loading of the
engine for all the additive-fuel blends. But there was a reduc-

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[2] Janet Yanowitz,Earl Christensen and Rober L.McCormick “Utiliza-

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Fig. 11: Hydrocarbon “HC”(ppm) VS Brake Power(kW) Hydro carbon emission was reduced significantly during the
cold start of the engine while using methanol blended gasoline, indicating an improvement in combustion efficiency. This can be attributed towards the higher oxygen content of methanol. Chemically methanol is an aliphatic alcohol containing about 50% oxygen by mass. Blend of 10% Methanol with 90% Gasoline has produced the lowest HC emission during the cold start.

4 CONCLUSION

In this paper we investigated the impact of using Methanol blended gasoline as a fuel instead of using pure gasoline in a 4 stroke, 4 cylinder spark ignition engine.
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