Fanhua Ma

By Fanhua Ma and Roopesh Kumar Mehra

The reserves of the petroleum‐based fuels are directly correlated with the increasing demand of human mankind for energy production. With the growing world populations, industries, vehicles, and equipment, energy demand leads to the search for the substitute of petroleum fuels, which can cater for the need of people today. Considering the current global economic crisis, the interest in alternative fuels is extremely high. It is known that there is a limited amount of fossil‐based fuels as a sustainable energy source. The majority of the energy used today is obtained from the fossil fuels. Due to the continuing increase over the cost of fossil fuels, demands for clean energy have also been increasing. With this increasing demand for energy very soon the petroleum fuels will be depleted so researchers are focusing on to find the ways and means to generate cheap and abundant renewable and clean energy sources. Moving ahead with these plans, hydrogen‐enriched compressed natural gas (HCNG) engines have emerged as a future energy carrier for an internal combustion engine. Several countries are striving hard to bring down the pollution level by promoting hydrogen‐enriched compressed natural gas‐fueled vehicles in general by powering heavy vehicles like transportation buses as well as passenger cars. In general, under certain conditions, the indicated thermal efficiency of the HCNG engine is much better than CNG engines without compromising the high level of pollutant emissions. Even so, the hydrogen addition to CNG increases the NOx emission, due to high heat generated inside combustion chamber. This can be minimized by application of lean‐burn combustion or with three‐way catalyst.

Part of the book: Sustainable Energy