Basic tuning of hydrogen powered car and artificial intelligent prediction of hydrogen engine characteristics

Many studies of renewable energy have shown hydrogen is one of the major green energy in the future. This has lead to the development of many automotive application of using hydrogen as a fuel especially in internal combustion engine. Nonetheless, there has been a slow growth and less knowledge details in building up the prototype and control methodology of the hydrogen internal combustion engine [1]. In this paper, The Toyota Corolla 4 cylinder, 1.81 engine running on petrol was systematically modified in such a way that it could be operated on either gasoline or hydrogen at the choice of the driver. Within the scope of this project, several ancillary instruments such as a new inlet manifold, hydrogen fuel injection, storage system and leak detection safety system were implemented. Attention is directed towards special characteristics related to the basic tuning of hydrogen engine such as: air to fuel ratio operating conditions, ignition timing and injection timing in terms of different engine speed and throttle position. Based on the experimental data, a suite of neural network models were tested to accurately predict the effect of different engine operating conditions (speed and throttle position) on the hydrogen powered car engine characteristics. Predictions were found to be +/- 3% to the experimental values for all of case studies. This work provided better understanding of the effect of hydrogen engine characteristic parameters on different engine operating conditions. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. All rights reserved.