Term of Award

Summer 2013

Degree Name

Master of Science in Applied Engineering (M.S.A.E.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Committee Chair

Valentin Soloiu

Committee Member 1

Aniruddha Mitra

Committee Member 2

Anoop Desai

Abstract

In our society, air transportation plays a considerable role in the world, thus with increasing fuel prices, this affects airport production in providing service to their consumers which makes the airports look for alternative fuels to maintain or improve performance and emission reduction. With airports striving to be better neighbors in their communities through improving environment by air emission reduction, the focus is on the airport ground support equipment (GSE) through the use of the US military’s Single Fuel Concept policy. This concept mandates that deployed U.S. military ground vehicles must be operable with aviation fuel (JP-8) and with this substitution of JP-8 for diesel concerns about the compatibility of this fuel with existing diesel engine systems arise. It is for this reason, this research investigates the combustion, emissions, and performance characteristics of JP-8 and Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) fuels in airport ground support equipment engine (GSE) similar to the experimental diesel engine, respectively, in a direct injection (DI) compression ignition engine over the load range of 2-6 bar bmep at 1400 rpm to simulate an everyday application of a GSE pushback tractor. The results showed that JP-8 and ULSD had ignition delays ranging from approximately 1.0-1.2ms. Cylinder maximum heat flux values were found to be between 1.7 and 3.2 MW/m2 , with radiation flux increasing much faster than convection flux while increasing the bmep. Combustion maximum bulk temperature was in the range of 1550 K to 2200K, and also increased with load. Both mechanical and overall efficiencies increased with bmep at constant speed but were minimally influenced by the fuel blend. Soot showed an increase at higher loads ranging between 0.09- 0.8 g/kWh while carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions showed a decrease in value by increasing bmep at constant speed. NOx increased with higher loads and higher cycle temperatures while the UHC (unburned hydrocarbons) emissions were decreased with load and maintained similar for all blends at constant bmep. The results suggest that JP-8 and ULSD with have highly comparable combustion characteristics in a DI compression ignition engine and having similar CN is the paramount characteristic in comparing ULSD and JP-8.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

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