Alternative fuel and gasoline in an SI engine: A comparative study of performance and emissions characteristics

The strict regulation of environmental laws, the price of oil and its restricted resources, has made engine manufacturers use other energy resources instead of oil and its products. Despite the fact that nowadays alternative fuels are not currently widely used in vehicular applications, using these kinds of fuels will be definitely inevitable in the future. In this paper, a computer code is developed in Matlab environment and then its results are validated with experimental data. This simulated engine model could be used as an powerful tool to investigate the performance and emission of a given SI engine fueled by alternative fuels including hydrogen, propane, methane, ethanol and methanol. Also, the superior of alternative fuels is shown by comparing the performance and emissions of alternative fueled engines to those in conventional fueled engines. Eventually, it is concluded that volumetric efficiency of the engine working on hydrogen is the lowest (28% less that gasoline fueled engine), gasoline produce more power than the all being tested alternative fuels and BSFC of methanol is 91% higher than that of gasoline while BSFC of hydrogen is 63% less than gasoline.