Effects of air intake temperature on the fuel consumption and exhaust emissions of natural aspirated gasoline engine

Abstract

Improving fuel consumption with lower exhaust emissions give more focused to all car manufactures. A higher engine performance with lower exhaust emissions requires a complete mixing process resulted in ultra-lean high combustion efficiency. Air intake temperature is one of the alternative strategies to improve fuel consumption and reduced exhaust emissions. This is due to the cold air is denser and contain higher oxygen availability. Air intake temperature will affect to the oxygen concentration in the charged air that influence the combustion process through ignition delay and fuel burning rate. The objective of this experiment is to investigate the effects of air intake temperature to the fuel consumption and exhaust emission at variation of engine speeds and constant load by using 1.6L gasoline engine. Air intake temperature was changed from 20 °C to 30 °C. The DaTAQ Pro V2 software was used to measure the engine fuel consumption while gas analyzer (MRU Gas Analyzer) was used to measure the exhaust emission such as Unburned hydrocarbons (UHCs) and carbon monoxide (CO). The results showed that fuel consumption, UHCs and CO emissions increased with the increase of air intake temperature. The increase of air intake temperature resulted in advanced and shorter combustion duration. Higher oxygen concentration at lower air intake temperature leads to the complete mixing process and complete combustion. Therefore, the experimental results can be concluded that the lower air intake temperature resulted in improved fuel consumption and reduced UHCs and CO emissions.