Southwest Research Institute is investigating clean automotive technologies to enable traditional internal combustion (IC) engines to efficiently run on hydrogen fuel.
Southwest Research Institute is investigating clean automotive technologies to enable traditional internal combustion (IC) engines to efficiently run on hydrogen fuel.
Government and industry researchers have in recent years sought methods to transition transportation energy usage away from fuels that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) — a greenhouse gas (GHG) that contributes to climate change — to hydrogen and other alternative fuels that emit less CO2 on a well-to-wheel basis. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation alone produced 29% of total U.S. GHG emissions in 2019, the largest share.
Researchers have long aimed to use hydrogen in place of gasoline, diesel, and natural gas in IC engines. While hydrogen burns well inside IC engines thanks to a high flame speed, its unique properties, such as its low ignition energy, pose engineering challenges to be overcome. These properties promote pre-ignition, a process during which a mixture of air and fuel ignites in the unburned fuel, leading to uncontrolled combustion and subsequently damaging the engine.
SwRI’s Powertrain Engineering Division is researching potential solutions to these challenges, including higher-efficiency approaches to preexisting hydrogen IC engine concepts. The hope is that automakers can use the improved hydrogen-fueled engines to transition from current CO2-emitting engines to the zero-emission future.
Read more at Southwest Research Institute
Image: Dr. Graham Conway, pictured here with a Hydrogen-fueled internal combustion engine, and colleagues Dr. Thomas E. Briggs, SwRI Staff Engineer, and Dr. Terry Alger, director of SwRI’s Automotive Propulsion Systems Department, recently ran simulations of four novel approaches for using spark-ignited combustion of hydrogen to fuel an IC engine. (Credit: SwRI)
