Research on the load control of hydrogen-fueled Wankel rotary engine

Hydrogen-fueled Wankel rotary engine (WRE) suffers from high NOx emissions, high risk of knock and uneven thermal load. The goal of this work is to investigate the application of quantitative control and qualitative control on a hydrogen-fueled WRE and find a suitable load control strategy for hydrogen-fueled WRE to address above-mentioned problems, which is conducted at 1500r/min. The results show that the combination of qualitative control and quantitative control is an effective way to obtain the excellent performance of hydrogen-fueled WRE, which can achieve higher thermal efficiency while effectively improving some drawbacks of hydrogen-fueled WRE, such as uneven thermal load, high tendency of knock and high NOx emissions. Besides, it also can flexibly select control logic according to the priority of emissions, efficiency, stability and power. Compared to quantitative control, the combined control can realize higher brake thermal efficiency under the same brake torque, and the highest relative and absolute improvements are 38.4% and 4.75%. In addition, it also keeps the engine running in an acceptable cyclic variation range.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC.

Automated summary

This study investigates the application of quantitative and qualitative control on a hydrogen-fueled Wankel rotary engine (WRE). The results show that the combination of qualitative control and quantitative control is an effective way to improve the performance of a hydrogen-fueled WRE and address its drawbacks.