Research on the new combustion chamber design to operate with low methane number fuels in an internal combustion engine with pre-chamber

Gas flaring is the burning process of unwanted raw natural gas (NG) that cannot be processed during the oil and gas extraction and process operations. This research work aims to continue with the experimental prototyping and validation of a combustion chamber configuration to run low methane number (MN) fuels down to 35 with a 2 MW natural gas internal combustion engine (ICE) with a fuelled pre-chamber. As opposed to solutions available in the market for the aforementioned type of engines which are linked to huge power losses, the goal is not only to define a methodology to modify them to run those fuels consistently but also to achieve it with a minimum power and efficiency loss. The experiments conducted on a 175 kW single cylinder engine (SCE) in Guascor Energy's facilities, with a preliminary engine configuration, showed efficiency and output power loss when using low methane number gases. However, power losses were improved by 27.98% as compared with the previous work's results demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed technology. In particular, the highest losses were detected with a 35 methane number fuel, where the break mean effective pressure (BMEP) or output power reduction was 25.32% while efficiency losses reached values of 18.02%.