An experimental study on performance and cyclic variations in a spark ignition engine fuelled with hydrogen and gasoline

This paper focuses on the effect of fuel-air ratio on the performance and cyclic variations of single cylinder hydrogen and gasoline fueled spark ignition engine. the hydrogen fueled engine was operated at the wide-open throttle (wot) condition,while the engine fuelled with gasoline was operated with conventional carburetor mode by varying the throttle opening to vary equivalence ratio. all the experiments were conducted at a constant engine speed of 1600 rpm. the spark timing was set to minimum advance for best torque. as a result,it was found that there is about 29% reduction in the maximum power output of the engine when operating with hydrogen. the equivalence ratio could have been varied in the range of 0.3 < φ < 0.9 for hydrogen and of 0.8 < φ < 1.3 for gasoline. in all combustion periods,cyclic variations for hydrogen engine were much lower than that of gasoline engine. as a consequence,it was found that the engine gave similar output at equivalence ratio of φ = 1.1 for gasoline and φ = 0.6 for hydrogen. however the engine was operated more smoothly when fuelled with hydrogen. © 2013 tibtd printed in turkey.