Experimental Studies to Reduce Usage of Fossil Fuels and Improve Green Fuels by Adopting Hydrogen-Ammonia-Biodiesel as Trinary Fuel for RCCI Engine

Elumalai Ramachandran; Ravi Krishnaiah; Elumalai Perumal Venkatesan; Sreenivasa Reddy Medapati; Rajagopalan Sabarish; Sher Afghan Khan; Mohammad Asif; Emanoil Linul

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c06327

Experimental Studies to Reduce Usage of Fossil Fuels and Improve Green Fuels by Adopting Hydrogen-Ammonia-Biodiesel as Trinary Fuel for RCCI Engine

ACS Omega. 2023 Dec 17;9(1):741-752. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c06327. eCollection 2024 Jan 9.

Authors

Elumalai Ramachandran¹, Ravi Krishnaiah¹, Elumalai Perumal Venkatesan², Sreenivasa Reddy Medapati², Rajagopalan Sabarish³, Sher Afghan Khan⁴, Mohammad Asif⁵, Emanoil Linul⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, VIT University, Vellore 632014, India.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aditya Engineering College, Surampalem 533437, India.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bharath Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai 600 073, India.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIUM, Kuala Lumpur 53100, Malaysia.
⁵ Department of Chemical Engineering, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia.
⁶ Department of Mechanics and Strength of Materials, Politehnica University Timisoara, 300222, Timisoara, Romania.

Abstract

This study investigates the feasibility of hydrogen addition to achieve lower emissions and higher thermal efficiency in an ammonia-biodiesel-fueled reactivity-controlled compression ignition (RCCI) engine. A single-cylinder light-duty water-cooled compression ignition (CI) engine was adapted to run in RCCI combustion with port-injected ammonia and hydrogen as low reactive fuel (LRF) and direct-injected algal biodiesel as high reactive fuel (HRF). In our earlier study, the ammonia substitution ratio (ASR) was optimized as 40%. To optimize fuel and engine settings, hydrogen is added in quantities ranging from 5 to 20% by energy share. The combustion, performance, and emission characteristics were investigated for the trinary fuel operation. The result shows that the 20% hydrogen premixing with 40% ammonia-biodiesel RCCI operation increased the peak cylinder pressure (CP), peak heat release rate (HRR), and cumulative heat release rate (CHRR) by 15.12, 25.15, and 26.68%, respectively. Ignition delay (ID) and combustion duration (CD) were decreased by 15.53 and 11.24%, respectively. The combustion phasing angle was advanced by 4 °CA. The brake thermal efficiency (BTE) was improved by 15.49%, and brake specific energy consumption (BSEC) was reduced by 21.92%. While the nitrogen oxide (NOx) level was significantly increased by about 31.82%, the hydrocarbon (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), smoke, and exhaust gas temperature (EGT) were reduced by 24.53, 28.16, 25.82, and 17.47% as compared to the optimized ASR40% combustion.