Publication

Abstract : According to present statistics, India is the 6th highest consumer of fossil fuels in the world. This raises high concerns in terms of emissions and import bills. Most recently India has taken stand to promote alternate fuels such as Methanol/biofuels and blends as substitute for conventional fuels. The use of blended fuel, without change in configuration of engine or in operating parameters can lead to lower performance. Operating parameters are to be optimized to obtain improvement in performance. Optimization requires rigorous experimentation, which increases cost of production for automotive manufacturers and simulation facilitates an early understanding of the engines behaviour. In this study, a 0.8 litre, 27.6 kW PFI engine is modelled and analysed to investigate the response of methanol-gasoline blends and experimental work is conducted for validation. Results indicated, with methanol blended up to 20% by volume, engine brake power was lower than base line gasoline but for blends of 20-50% by volume brake power and torque showed higher value than gasoline values. For M30, M40 and M50 with blend composition there was a proportionate increase in BSFC for all speed ranges.