Control Scheme Formulation for the Production of Hydrogen on Demand to Feed an Internal Combustion Engine

In this work, a control strategy is presented to produce hydrogen on demand to feed an internal combustion (IC) engine. For this purpose, the modeling of the IC engine fueled by gasoline blended with 10% v/v of anhydrous ethanol (E10) and hydrogen as an additive is developed. It is considered that the hydrogen gas is produced according to the IC engine demand, and that the hydrogen gas is obtained by an alkaline electrolyzer. The gasoline-ethanol blend added into the combustion chamber is determined according to the stoichiometric ratio and the production of hydrogen gas is regulated by a proportional and integral controller (P.I.). The controller reference is varying according to the mass flow air induced into the cylinder, in order to ensure an adequate production of hydrogen gas for any operating condition of the IC engine. The main contribution of this work is the control scheme developed, through simulation, in order to produce hydrogen on demand for any operating point of an internal combustion engine fueled by an E10 blend. The simulation results showed that the use of hydrogen gas as an additive in an E10 blend decreases the E10 fuel consumption 23% on average, and the thermal efficiency is increased approximately 2.13%, without brake power loss in the IC engine.