Dr Ganesh Duraisamy

From

College of Engineering - Guindy Campus, Anna University - IN 

In residence at

PRISME / INSA Centre Val de Loire, University of Orléans - FR

Host scientist

Prof. Christine Rousselle 

PROJECT

Potential of zero and low carbon fuels in high-efficiency clean combustion engines

Recently ammonia (NH3) attracted attention as a carbon-free fuel for non-road and marine engine applications.
NH3 combustion technology must be established in internal combustion engines to use NH3 as a fuel in non-road and marine engines. However, NH3 combustion in internal combustion engines has several challenges such as difficulty in ignition due to high auto-ignition temperature, slow chemical kinetics, higher oxides of nitrogen
(NOx), and unburnt ammonia emissions compared to conventional gasoline and diesel combustion. In particular,
nitrous oxide (N2O) which has 265 times higher global warming potential than CO2, must be carefully addressed. To achieve auto-ignition of NH3, improve chemical kinetics, reduce NOx and N2O, a zero and
low-carbon fueled reactivity-controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion mode would be adopted in the
present investigation. In the present investigation, NH3 and dimethyl ether (DME) have been proposed as low and high-reactivity fuels respectively. DME is a potential high reactivity fuel because of its high cetane number than
diesel, exists in the gas phase at atmospheric conditions, and has lower liquefication pressure (around 6 bar). In addition, the absence of c-c bonding and its lower carbon content ensures soot-free and reduced carbon emissions.
Hence, using NH3/DME as dual fuels and adopting intelligent fuel injection strategies would burn
NH3 efficiently. Both NH3 and DME have lower liquefication pressure, hence both fuels can be injected in the gaseous and liquid phases at the intake and compression strokes to create required fuel reactivity stratification.
Different ammonia fuel reactivity stratification strategies are proposed to investigate its mixing as well as combustion process experimentally in an optical and compression ignition (CI) engine. By investigating the mixing
and combustion process of NH3/DME-air, the best suitable NH3 fuel reactivity stratification strategy would be selected. With the chosen NH3 stratification strategy, experiments would be performed on a commercial single-cylinder, non-road, modified CI engine for a detailed investigation of combustion, performance, and emissions.