Effect of Hydrogen Addition to Natural Gas on Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition Combustion Engines Performance and Emissions Using a Thermodynamic Simulation

The HCCI combustion process is initiated due to auto-ignition of fuel/air mixture which is dominated by chemical kinetics and therefore fuel composition has a significant effect on engine operation and a detailed reaction mechanism is essential to analysis HCCI combustion. A single zone-model permits to have a detailed chemical kinetics modeling for practical fuels. In this study a single-zone thermodynamic model with detail chemical mechanism is developed to investigate the effect of hydrogen addition to natural gas in a homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion and to analyze the performance and emissions of the HCCI engine. The effect of five different percentage of hydrogen added to natural gas ranging from 0 to 40 on HCCI combustion is investigated in this study. The results indicate that by increasing hydrogen portion in intake mixture, start of combustion advances and maximum temperature increase, but increasing in maximum pressure is negligible. Carbon’s included emissions such as Co, Co2 and unburned hydrocarbons decreases by increasing of hydrogen, and also, specific fuel consumption decreases. The result shows that hydrogen improves combustion characteristics of natural gas in an HCCI engine and leads to better performance and less emissions.