Engine Testing of Diesel Fuels

Abstract

The goal has been to test different fuels in an engine, in order to do relative comparisons of how suitable the fuels are for powering an engine. These tests were performed on the Ricardo Hydra research engine in NTNU?s Marine Machinery Laboratory. The fuels investigated were Marine Gas Oil (MGO) and Gas-To-Liquid diesel (GTL), with MGO as the reference fuel.The Hydra engine was being rebuilt during the beginning of the semester, and when testing began several issues were encountered. Maintaining a stable fuel injection pressure proved to be very hard, and for GTL diesel it was not possible to do all the tests intended. This was not related to the fuel itself, and the engine was successfully operated on both fuels.In the end there was only one satisfactory test result with GTL diesel, so only some properties could be identified. The impact of varying speed and load could not be investigated, so it is unknown if some of the results are coincidental or part of a trend. The only clear results are that GTL diesel ignites faster than MGO, and there are less cyclic variations in the combustion when operating on GTL diesel.Had the engine issues been known from the start the project would not have been undertaken.