Investigation of Flame Characteristics of Ethanol-Gasoline Blends Combustion Using Constant Volume Chamber

Combustion Research Group (CRG), Centre for Energy and Industrial Environment Studies (CEIES), Faculty of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia

^* Corresponding author: yatiepytie@gmail.com

Abstract

The stricter on emission legislation and growing demands for lower fuel consumption require significant efforts to improve combustion efficiency while satisfying the demand of emission quality. Gasoline blend with ethanol provided advantages due to its self-sustaining concept and high octane number which can be influenced to the combustion process. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect on the emission and flame propagation of gasoline under the different blending ratio of ethanol fuel in a constant volume chamber. In this paper, the flame propagation of ethanol blends with gasoline in a constant volume chamber has been carried out. The real image is observed by schlieren optical visualization technique and image processing technique. The parameters in this study also included different types of injection pressure, characteristics of flame propagation and different blending ratio of ethanol in gasoline fuels. As a result, the burn rate increases when the content of ethanol percentage in gasoline increased. Therefore, the higher flame propagation area for 0.2 MPa, 0.3 MPa, 0.4 MPa were headed by E15 followed by E10, E5 and gasoline fuels respectively. It is subjected that the increasing of ethanol percentage blends with gasoline could lead to the reduction of CO, HC and NOX emissions. However, the CO2 emission is higher due to the combustion process was enhanced.