Diesel engines are one of the most popular reciprocating engines on the market today owing to their great thermal efficiency and dependability in energy conversion. Growing concerns about the depletion of fossil resources, fluctuating prices in the market, and environmental issues have prompted the search for renewable fuels with higher efficiencies compared with conventional fuels. Fuel derived from vegetable oils and animal fats has comparable characteristics to diesel fuel, but is renewable, despite being manufactured from various feedstocks. Nevertheless, the direct use of these fuels is strictly prohibited because it will result in many issues in the engine, affecting engine performance and durability, as well as emissions. To make biofuels as efficient as fossil fuels, it is essential to alter their characteristics. The use of emulsification techniques to obtain emulsified biofuels is one of the many ways to modify the fuel characteristics. Emulsification techniques allow for a d... [more]

With its unique qualities, such as infinite supply, high octane number, and capacity to cut greenhouse gas emissions, alcohol is a viable alternative fuel for SI engines. This review article aims to reveal to readers the effects of alcohol on the performance, combustion behavior, and emission characteristics of SI engines by collecting the outcomes from previous research. This article looks at methanol, ethanol, and butanol fuel qualities. The performance of SI engines with butanol, ethanol, and methanol combined with gasoline is investigated in terms of brake torque, brake power, fuel consumption, thermal efficiency, volumetric efficiency, mean effective pressure, and coefficient of variation under various conditions. Second, in-cylinder pressure, mass fraction burnt, ignition delay, pressure increases, and heat release rates are also used to evaluate the combustion characteristic. Finally, the article discusses pollutant emissions such as CO, CO2, NOx, UHC, and exhaust gas temperatur... [more]

In recent decades, many kinds of research have been conducted on alternative fuels for compression ignition (CI) engines. Low/zero-carbon fuels, such as bioalcohols and hydrogen, are the most promising alternative fuels and are extensively studied because of their availability, ease of manufacturing, and environmental benefits. Using these promising fuels in CI engines is environmentally and economically beneficial. The most common alcohols are methanol, ethanol, isopropanol, propanol, butanol, n-butanol, tert-butanol, iso-butanol, and pentanol. The primary objective of this review paper is to examine the impact of bioalcohols and their blends with conventional diesel fuel in CI engines since these fuels possess characteristic properties that impact overall engine performance and exhaust emissions. This research also indicated that alcohols and blended fuels could be used as fuels in compression ignition engines. Chemical and physical properties of alcohols were examined, such as lubri... [more]

Compression ignition (CI) engines that run on high-viscosity fuels (HVF) like emulsified biofuels generally demonstrate poor engine performance. An engine with a consistently low performance, in the long run, will have a negative effect on its lifespan. Poor combustion in engines occurs mainly due to the production of less volatile, less flammable, denser, and heavier molecules of HVF during injection. This paper proposes a guide vane design (GVD) to be installed at the intake manifold, which is incorporated with a shallow depth re-entrance combustion chamber (SCC) piston. This minor modification will be advantageous in improving the evaporation, diffusion, and combustion processes in the engine to further enhance its performance. The CAD models of the GVD and SCC piston were designed using SolidWorks 2018 while the flow run analysis of the cold flow CI engine was conducted using ANSYS Fluent Version 15. In this study, five designs of the GVD with varying lengths of the vanes from 0.6D... [more]

Lecture slides from the Fall 2018 CHEM ENG 4A03/6A03 Energy System Engineering course at McMaster University are attached. Energy Systems Engineering is a survey course that discusses many ways in which energy products are produced, transported, converted, and consumed in our society today. The lectures correspond to two 50-minute lectures a week for 13 weeks (some slide decks take 2 or 3 lectures to complete). The course cannot cover all energy systems of course, but focus mostly on large-scale or common processes either in use today or currently in development and research. The course takes a chemical engineering perspective so more attention is paid to processes and thermochemical phenomena and less attention is paid to issues related to mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, although there is some intersection.

The lecture slides include the following topics:

1.1. Life Cycle Analysis (basic review)
1.2. Key Metrics in Energy Systems
2.1. Coal Production
2.2. Nat... [more]