Comparison of a dual-fuel internal combustion engine performance for CNG and gasoline fuels

In this paper, comparison of a dual-fuel internal combustion engine performance for CNG and gasoline fuels is evaluated at the steady-state condition by application of energy and exergy analysis using the experimental test results. The energy and exergy balances are calculated at different engine speeds. The results show that the energy and exergy of the heat rejection for gasoline and CNG fuels increases with increasing engine speed and the exergy efficiencies are slightly higher than the corresponding energy efficiencies. Moreover, the results show that the exergy efficiency for gas-fuel is higher than the gasoline-fuel exergy efficiency at all engine speeds. The results show that due to volumetric efficiency drop, power and torque of the gas-fuel engine is lower than gasoline-fuel one. Furthermore, the specific fuel consumption of the gas-fuel engine is lower than gasoline-fuel one. The results of this study have revealed that the most important source of the system inefficiency is the destruction of exergy by irreversible processes, mostly by the combustion. Moreover, it should be noted that liquid fuels like gasoline have many important advantages like much greater volumetric energy density, ease of transport and storage, which have made them as the preferred fuels for IC engines.