Advanced Combustion in Natural Gas-Fueled Engines

Current energy and emission regulations set the requirements to increase the use of natural gas in engines for transportation and power generation. The characteristics of natural gas are high octane number, less amount of carbon in the molecule, suitable to lean combustion, less ignitibility, etc. There are some advantages of using natural gas for engine combustion. First, less carbon dioxide is emitted due to its molecular characteristics. Second, higher thermal efficiency is achieved owing to the high compression ratio compared to that of gasoline engines. Natural gas has higher octane number so that knock is hard to occur even at high compression ratios. However, this becomes a disadvantage in homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engines or compression ignition engines because the initial auto-ignition is difficult to be achieved. When natural gas is used in a diesel engine, primary natural gas–air mixture is ignited with small amount of diesel fuel. It was found that under high pressure, lean conditions, and with the control of certain parameters, the end gas is auto-ignited without knock and improves the engine combustion efficiency. Recently, some new fuel ignition technologies have been developed to be applied to natural gas engines. These are the laser-assisted and plasma-assisted ignition systems with high energy and compact size.