Performance, Emission and Combustion Characteristics of a Hydrogen Fueled SI engine - An Experimental Study

In the present work, experiments were conducted on a single cylinder, three-wheeler, spark ignition engine operating with hydrogen as a fuel. In this work, hydrogen was inducted through the intake manifold to the engine. The engine was always operated with wide-open throttle (WOT). To vary the output, the equivalence ratio was varied. For all outputs, the spark timing was set for MBT (minimum advance for best torque). For each output, performance, emission and combustion parameters were recorded and analyzed. For comparison of results, with the same engine, the experiments were also conducted with gasoline as a fuel using a conventional carburetor. It was observed that the hydrogen engine produces less maximum power than its gasoline counterpart. From the analysis of the results, it was found that the efficiency of hydrogen engine was quite higher than gasoline engine at optimized conditions at all the operating points. With hydrogen operation, exhaust emissions were almost negligible at low equivalence ratios. But, at higher loads, NOx emissions were found to increase drastically. Cycle by cycle variations was less with hydrogen even with very lean mixtures.