Preventive knock protection technique for stationary SI engines fuelled by natural gas

In a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, spark ignition engines must operate at their maximum power to reduce the pay back time. Because of environmental and economic concerns, engines are set with high compression ratios. Consequently, optimal operating conditions are generally very close to those of knock occurrence and heavy knock can severely damage the engine piston.There are two main protection techniques: the curative one commonly used by engine manufacturers and well documented in the literature and the preventive one based on a knock prediction according to the quality of the supplied gas. The indicator used to describe gas quality is the methane number (MN). The methane number requirement (MNR) of the engine is defined, for an engine set (spark advance, air–fuel ratio, and load), as the minimum value of MN above which knock free operation is ensured. To prevent knock occurrence, it is necessary to adapt the engine tuning according to variable gas composition. The objective of the present work is to validate the concept of knock preventive protection. First, a prediction of MNR according to engine settings (ES) is computed through a combustion simulator composed of a thermodynamic 2-zone model. Predicted MNR are compared to experimental results performed on a single-cylinder SI gas engine and show good agreement with numerical results (uncertainty below 1 point). Then, the combustion simulator is used to generate a protection mapping. At last, the knock preventive protection was successfully tested.