Spark Advance Modeling of Hydrogen-Fueled Spark Ignition Engines Using Combustion Descriptors

In-cylinder pressure-based combustion descriptors have been widely used for engine combustion control and spark advance scheduling. Although these combustion descriptors have been extensively studied for gasoline-fueled spark ignition (SI) engines, adequate literature is not available on use of alternative fuels in SI engines. In an attempt to partially address this gap, present work focuses on spark advance modeling of hydrogen-fueled SI engines based on combustion descriptors. In this study, two such combustion descriptors, namely, position of the pressure peak (PPP) and 50% mass fraction burned (MFB) have been used to evaluate the efficiency of the combustion. With a view to achieve this objective, numerical simulation of engine processes was carried out in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS fluent and simulation data were subsequently validated with the experimental results. In view of typical combustion characteristics of hydrogen fuel, spark advance plays a very crucial role in the system development. Based on these numerical simulation results, it was observed that the empirical rules used for combustion descriptors (PPP and 50% MFB) for the best spark advance in conventional gasoline fueled engines do not hold good for hydrogen engines. This work suggests revised empirical rules as: PPP is 8–9 deg after piston top dead center (ATDC) and position of 50% MFB is 0–1 deg ATDC for the maximum brake torque (MBT) conditions. This range may vary slightly with engine design but remains almost constant for a particular engine configuration. Furthermore, using these empirical rules, spark advance timings for the engine are presented for its working range.