Investigation of a wet ethanol operated HCCI engine based on first and second law analyses

In this paper, a conceptual wet ethanol operated homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine is proposed to shift the energy balance in favor of ethanol. The investigated option, HCCI engine is a relatively new type of engine that has some fundamental differences with respect to other prime movers. Combined first and second law of thermodynamic approach is applied for a HCCI engine operating on wet ethanol and computational analysis is performed to investigate the effects of turbocharger compressor ratio, ambient temperature, and compressor adiabatic efficiency on first law efficiency, second law efficiency, and exergy destruction in each component. First law and second law efficiencies are found to be an increasing function of the turbocharger pressure ratio, while they are found to be a decreasing function of the ambient temperature. The effect of turbocharger pressure ratio on exergy destruction is found to be more significant than compressor efficiency and ambient temperature. Exergy analysis indicates that maximum exergy is destroyed in HCCI engine which represents about 90.09% of the total exergy destruction in the overall system. Around 4.39% exergy is destroyed by the process of heat transfer in fuel vaporizer and heat exchanger. Catalytic converter contributes about 4.08% of the total exergy destruction. This will provide some original information on the role of operating variables and will be quite useful in obtaining the optimum design of ethanol fuelled HCCI engines. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.