Experimental Investigation on Effect of Compression Ratio and Spark Timing in Single Cylinder Four Stroke C.I. Engine fuelled with LPG for Performance Enhancement

The research on alternative fuels has become essential due to depletion of petroleum products and the rate at which earth atmosphere get polluted. Diesel and petrol engines are found to emit more NOx and smoke emissions in addition to its rapid depletion. Hence, it is very important to find a best alternative fuel, which can fully or partially replace diesel/gasoline which emits fewer pollutants to the atmosphere from diesel/gasoline engines. The alternative fuels like CNG, LPG, Bio-gas, Bio-diesel and Hydrogen has been used widely in transportation sector. LPG is among the many alternatives proposed to replace diesel/gasoline in the short term due to its excellent characteristics as a fuel for spark ignition engines. It was also observed that LPG is directly retrofitted in existing SI engine. As far as properties of LPG are concern it may not give satisfactory performance at lower compression ratio and small spark advanced. So in present work, experimental investigation have been carried out on GL-400, single cylinder, 4-stroke, air cooled diesel converted in to LPG fuelled spark ignition engine to measure the performance and emissions parameters at various compression ratio like 9, 10, 11.3, 12.4, 13.1 and 13.8 and spark timing like 25°, 30° and 35° BTDC. After experimental research it was found that BSFC and BTE was improve and CO, CO2 and HC emission was drastically decrease as compression ratio vary from 9 to 13.1. Also along with advanced the spark timing from 25° to 35°BTDC.