The influence of air–fuel ratio on engine performance and pollutant emission of an SI engine using ethanol–gasoline-blended fuels
Section snippets
1. Introduction
With the rapid development of the industry and society, the requirement of fossil fuels is growing higher and higher, so there is great anxiety about the shortage of energy because of finite reserves or other political reasons (such as petroleum crisis and the Persian Gulf War). Besides designing more efficient engines to save fuel, we need to look for other energy sources to completely or partially substitute the fuels we are using at present. Then the demand and dependence on fossil fuels can
Experimental setup
Our experimental apparatus include four major systems namely, the engine system, power measurement system, exhaust system and injection system. The first three systems can be referred to Hsieh's (Hsieh et al., 2002) experimental equipments. The engine system used in the experiment is a 4-cylinder 8-valve commercial engine New Sentra GA16DE, which is a 1600 cm3 multi-point injection gasoline engine with cylinder bore and stroke 76.0 and 88.0 mm, respectively. The ports arrangements are Dual
Results and discussions
The difference between open- and closed-loop control is that in the closed-loop control, the on-board central unit controls the fuel injection strategy with feedback signal from the oxygen sensor placed in the exhaust pipe, while in open-loop control, injection is adjusted manually to change the air–fuel equivalence ratio. In this study, we use open-loop control to investigate the influence of the air–fuel ratio on engine performance and pollutant emission of ethanol–gasoline-blended fuels.
Conclusion
In this study, engine performance and pollutant emission were measured on the utilization of the ethanol–gasoline-blended fuel under different air–fuel equivalence ratios. The results showed that the air–fuel equivalence ratio and ethanol content play an important role in combustion process. We made the conclusions as follows:
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When air–fuel ratio is slightly smaller than one, maximum torque output and minimum bshc are available. Using ethanol–gasoline-blended fuels improves torque output.
Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by the Commission on Sustainable Development Research, National Science Council, and the Bureau of Air Quality Protection and Noise Control, Environmental Protection Administration, Taiwan, ROC, under the contract of NSC88-EPA-Z006-008.
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