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Optimizing Dual Fuel Engine Technologies for Low Carbon Fuel Utilization in the Marine Sector

Academic lead
Dr Hu Li, SCAPE, H.Li3@leeds.ac.uk
Co-supervisor(s)
Prof Alison Tomlin, SCAPE, A.S.Tomlin@leeds.ac.uk, Dr Amir Khan, Civil Engineering, A.Khan@leeds.ac.uk
Project themes
Clean Energy, Computational & Analytical Tools, Experimental Techniques, Transport

The global shipping industry faces increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint, and is looking to low carbon fuel alternatives such as ammonia and methanol to replace fossil based diesel. These fuels present promise in terms of possibilities to produce them from low carbon feed-stocks (e.g. green hydrogen) but are challenging in terms of their energy density and combustion characteristics. The project aims to explore and optimize the use of dual fuel engines for their potential use in the marine sector, with a focus on maximizing their efficiency and sustainability. Fuelling and injection strategies are likely to be based on co-combustion with more reactive components such as hydrogen itself. The research will explore blending and injection strategies using ammonia and methanol with hydrogen injection in dual fuel engines, for optimal energy efficiency and emission profiles. The project will involve a combination of experimental engine testing and advanced computational modelling, to determine optimal engine configurations and fuel blends. Modelling combustion characteristics will necessitate the use of detailed combustion mechanisms within a range of reactive flow modelling scenarios. Operator splitting and machine learning techniques will be explored to facilitate the computational efficiency of the chemically reacting part of the simulations.