EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF GASOLINE AND CNG IN A SI ENGINE FOR PERFORMANCE AND EMISSIONS

Abstract

It is well known, that fossil fuel reserves all over the world are diminishing at an alarming rate and a shortage of crude oil expected at the early decades of this century. Probably in this century, it believed that crude oil and petroleum products become very scare and costly to find and produce. Gasoline and diesel will become scarce and most costly. Alternative fuel technology, availability and use must and will become more common in the coming decades. Any researchers did the several researches to substitute fossil fuel oil to another alternative fuels and one of it is used natural gas for the low emissions and sustainable fuel energy. Natural gas found in various locations in oil and gas bearing sand strata located at various depths below the earth surface. The gas is usually under considerable pressure and flows out naturally from the oil well. In addition to this, the deteriorating quality of air we breathe is becoming another great public concern and tighter regulation of both local and global emissions from engines anticipated. Natural gas is the most favourable for fossil fuel substitute. This paper is will to review the application of compressed natural gas (CNG) as an alternative fuel and the effect in engines performance and emissions. The review result shows that the CNG is the low emissions and the performance is not too decreasing than liquid fuel. We have done an experiment by using compressed natural gas (CNG) as the main fuel instead of gasoline in a 4-cylinder, 4-stroke spark ignition Wagon-R car engine at different loading conditions. The engine was converted to computer integrated bi-fuelling system from a gasoline engine, and operated separately either with gasoline or CNG. A personal computer (PC) based data acquisition and control system was used for controlling all the operation. A detailed comparative analysis of the engine performance and exhaust emissions using gasoline and CNG has been made. It is observed that the CNG shows low power, low brake vi specific fuel consumptions, higher efficiency and lower emissions of CO, CO₂, HC but more NOx compared to gasoline.