Possible applications of prechambers in hydrogen internal combustion engines

Abstract

The use of hydrogen as a fuel for an internal combustion engines has caused many problems for years, the most significant of which seems to be the excessive emission of nitrogen oxides and the tendency to knock combustion. In order to ensure better control of the combustion process in a internal combustion engine powered by hydrogen, it has been proposed to use a split combustion chamber solution. Following paper contains a description of a hydrogen combustion system that includes an analysis of possible technical solutions. The considerations take into account the issues of the dual nature of hydrogen knocking and the problem of burning a stratified charge of a hydrogen-air mixture in a cylinder.

Hydrogen, the future of aviation

“…This is due to a number of factors including: a much higher flame rate, a difference in the mixture equivalence ratio, and a much lower energy required to ignite the hydrogen resulting in a tendency for knocking combustion to occur. This problem was comprehensively overviewed by the Matla [10] indicating the compression ratio and mixture equivalence ratio influence on the knocking combustion and discussing advantages of prechamber implementation as a method of combustion control feature.…”

Analysis of the prospects for hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engines

“…Compared to hydrocarbon fuels, the flammability range of hydrogen is very wide, it ranges from 4 to 76% of the volume content in air [9,21,28] (these values are for example 1-7.6% for diesel oil, and 0.6-5.5% for gasoline). This property allows the engine to run on a very lean mixture.…”

Study of the effect of ignition crank angle and mixture composition on the performance of a spark-ignition engine fueled with ethanol

“…It is clear that it is not possible to quickly replace internal combustion engines with electric ones [19], so work and research are being conducted so that internal combustion engines could remain in use but their consumption of fossil fuels was minimized [22]. In addition to zerocarbon fuels such as hydrogen [15,21] or its mixtures with oxygen (HHO) [9,11,33], reduced-carbon fuels such as gases [10] or alcohols [12,28] are being used. These can be the primary fuel or used as an additive to the original/factory fuel [1,3].…”

“…Alcohol fuels such as ethyl alcohol, which is produced by fermenting plant biomass, are an important type of fuel produced from plant components [31]. Many publications refer to the use of alcohol fuels in internal combustion engines and their impact on the operating parameters of such engines such as vibration and the way they are measured [6,27], noise intensity [13], energy efficiency [2] or reduction in the number of harmful exhaust components [15,23]. Ongoing research has shown that the use of alcohol addi-tives and alcohol as a stand-alone fuel both in sparkignition engines [16,25] and diesel engines [17,30] can significantly affect the engine performance.…”