Performance improvement and CO and HC emission reduction of variable compression ratio spark-ignition engine using n-pentanol as a fuel additive

This study tests binary and ternary n-pentanol, ethanol, and petrol blends to increase spark-ignition (SI) engine performance and minimize CO and HC emissions. To improve brake thermal efficiency (BTE) and reduce emissions, adding ethanol into gasoline is one of the practices used in Automobiles. But the literature reported some performance limitations and problems with adding a high ethanol concentration to gasoline as phase separation problem occurs in fuel tank due to the hygroscopic nature of ethanol, a higher ethanol concentration may corrode some parts of the fuel supply system. Ethanol has a lower calorific value than gasoline, so a higher ethanol concen-tration in blends beyond a specific limit reduces BTE. N-pentanol as a fuel additive in gasoline can better solve these problems due to its high caloric value compared to ethanol. Also, when n-pentanol is mixed with gasoline and exposed to moisture, it does not separate in stages as in the ethanol case. Accordingly, this research aims to evaluate n-pentanol's viability as a fuel additive in petrol and ethanol-gasoline blends at different compression ratios. The experiments were carried out on a single-cylinder, four-stroke spark-ignition engine running at a constant speed. Different blends of n-pentanol with gasoline and ethanol were tested, and results were compared against gasoline and E10 (the optimal blend of ethanol-gasoline, 10/90 v/v %). Various parameters were examined, including BTE, brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC), and different exhaust pollu-tants. The effects of compression ratio values on these parameters were also recorded. The 1.5 vol% pentanol with E10 (E10P1.5) mix has the best overall characteristics, including low BSFC, high BTE, and low CO and HC emissions compared to petrol and E10 fuels. E10P1.5 shows a max-imum enhancement in BTE, low BSFC, CO reduction, and HC reduction by 23.79%, 19.80%, 37.79%, and 19.46%, respectively, over gasoline. Compared to E10, the improvement is 3.64% for BTE, 4.59% for BSFC, 8.88% for CO emission reduction, and 4.13% for HC emission reduc-tion.(c) 2023 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).