A STUDY OF DIFFERENT EGR ROUTES ON A HEAVY DUTY STOICHIOMETRIC NATURAL GAS ENGINE

Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is a suitable strategy to optimize heavy duty natural gas (NG) engines. EGR could be utilized to have high specific power, with low thermal stress, but also to increase engine efficiency. NG fuelling permits a large flexibility in EGR system design, due to very clean engine exhaust. In this paper, three types of EGR routes have been studied. The best set up, which can introduce the highest EGR quantities, to provide the best reduction of the thermal load at rated power, was found to be a cooled low pressure EGR route. However high low pressure route (HLPR) could give the possibility to increase engine efficiency by modulating the power output in the widest un-throttled range operation.