An Experimental and Theoretical Study of the Effects of Excess Air Ratio and Waste Gate Opening Pressure Threshold on Nox Emission and Performance in a Turbocharged CNG SI Engine

Abstract

Turbocharged CNG engines produce high NOx emission due to the fuel type and high combustion temperature. In this research, the effects of lean-burn and waste gate opening pressure threshold on NOx emission are studied theoretically and experimentally at WOT condition as well as 13-mode ECE-R49 test cycle. A code is developed in MATLAB environment for predicting engine NOx and the results are validated with the research experiments. Simulations show that NOx increases by increase of excess air ratio and reaches at most to 2486ppm at excess air ratio of 1.1 and then decreases. It is also experimentally found that changing waste gate opening pressure threshold from 165mmHg to 200 and 265mmHg decreases total bsNOx at a rate of 6% and 12% respectively. Increase of the threshold to 323mmHg increases total bsNOx. Therefore, to minimize the cycle bsNOx, the threshold of 265mmHg is the optimum threshold for the engine between the four pressure thresholds experimented.