Applying fischer tropsch and its pentanol blends into an aviation compression ignition engine for PM emissions control

The aviation industry is recovering from COVID-19 to regain rapid growth at an increasing rate of over 5 % annually. Aviation compression ignition (CI) engines attributed to their economic fuel consumption and adorable reliability, have been widely utilized in the general aviation (GA) industry. To fill in the knowledge gap of the compatibility of Fischer Tropsch (FT) blended with long-chain oxygenated fuel applied into the aviation engines, this research focuses on analyzing the combustion performance and particle matter (PM) emissions of an aviation CI engine by burning FT alternative fuel and its pentanol blends (FT80P20 - 80 % FT + 20 % pentanol), in comparison with baseline diesel/pentanol-diesel blends (D80P20 - 80 % diesel + 20 % pentanol). It was found that FT80P20 significantly increases the indicated thermal efficiency (ITE) by 6.5 %, and remarkably decreases the indicated specific fuel consumption (ISFC) by 12 % in contrast to neat diesel at high load (8.5 bar IMEP), which is due to better homogeneous charge that alternates heterogeneous combustion. Moreover, the PM size-resolved number distributions of emissions were characterized. It was observed that the integrated PM emissions from diesel were predominant (∼1.4 × 10¹⁴ #/kg∙fuel), while those from FT80P20 were significantly reduced by nearly 85 % (∼0.2 × 10¹⁴ #/kg∙fuel). Concurrently, the particulate geometric mean diameter (GMD) were decreased apparently from 80 nm to 35 nm correspondingly. The research findings reveal that “main diffusion combustion” was predominant as burning diesel, while “main premixed combustion” was prominent as using FT80P20, which has a promising impact on effective engine-work promotion with superior PM mitigation.