Fuel Property Effects on Emissions and Performance of a Light-Duty Diesel Engine

Increased demand for highly fuel efficient propulsion systems drives the engine development community to develop advanced technologies allowing improving the overall thermal efficiency while maintaining low emission levels. In addition to improving the thermal efficiencies of the internal combustion engine itself the developments of fuels that allow improved combustion as well as lower the emissions footprint has intensified recently.

This paper will describe the effects of five different fuel types with significantly differing fuel properties on a state-of-the-art light-duty HSDI diesel engine. The fuels cetane number ranges between 26 and 76. These fuels feature significantly differing boiling characteristics as well as heating values. The fuel selection also contains one pure biodiesel (SME - Soy Methyl Ester). This study was conducted in part load and full load operating points using a state of the art HSDI diesel engine. The part load operating points had combustion parameter sweeps to widen the understanding of combustion dynamics associated with fuels of varying properties over performance and emissions, where as at full load the effect of constant volume fuel injection over performance and emissions was focused without parameter sweeps.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide the fuels and engine development community more insight on the fuel type effects on engine out emissions and performance.