Oxy-Fuel HCCI Combustion in a CFR Engine with Carbon Dioxide as a Thermal Buffer

Global warming and the increasingly stringent emission regulations call for alternative combustion techniques to reduce CO₂ emissions. Oxy-fuel combustion is one of those techniques since the combustion products are easily separated by condensing the water and storing CO₂. A problem associated with the burning of fuel using pure oxygen as an oxidant is that it results in high adiabatic flame temperature. This high flame temperature is decreased by introducing a thermal buffer to the system. A thermal buffer in this context is any gas that does not participate in combustion but at the same time absorbs some of the released heat and thus decreases the temperature of the medium. Many experiments have been conducted to study oxy-fuel combustion in ICE using noble gases as thermal buffers. However, those experiments focused on using hydrogen as a fuel to avoid any build-up of CO₂ in the system. On the contrary, the work presented in this paper investigates using CO₂ as a thermal buffer for oxy-fuel combustion in HCCI engines. Experiments were performed on a standard Waukesha variable compression ratio cooperative fuel research CFR engine, modified to run in HCCI mode. Emissions were measured using an AVL SESAM-i60 FTIR spectrometer. As expected, results showed that the CO₂ mixture degraded engine efficiency. The relatively lower engine temperature also decreased NO_x emissions, simultaneously increasing CO and unburned hydrocarbon (UHC) emissions.