August 2017 - Present
Project Supervisor: Prof. Avinash Kumar Agarwal
Our project aims to convert a Gasoline based 4-Stroke SI engine to an M85 (85% v/v methanol and 15% v/v gasoline) based SI engine and develop an M85 fueled motorcycle prototype. Methanol as a fuel, provides higher Octane number, lower Hydrocarbon and NOx emissions leading to a cleaner environment and higher fuel efficiency than petroleum-based gasoline making it a significantly environment-friendly fuel.
Methanol is a single component fuel produced from low-value biomass, MSW and high ash coal. The engine needs significant adaption, hardware modifications, and ECU calibration to operate on this new fuel. The first vehicle prototype in India, working on methanol-based fuel is developed in this project, which is a potent step in the direction of adaption of “Methanol Economy” in the country.
The experiments were conducted on Royal Enfield classic 500cc motorcycle engine, and the open ECU replaced the stock ECU of the motorcycle along with methanol compatible fuel injection equipment. • The use of open ECU allowed the control over various fuel injection parameters of the engine such as injection time, injection duration, spark advance, etc., which control the engine performance and emission. Base fuel maps were created for the open ECU using the combustion data and the stock ECU by reverse engineering. New fuel maps for M85 were created using these base maps as a reference and maximizing the torque for M85 fueling at different engine load-speed combination. The fuel maps were fine-tuned by minimizing the emissions.
Demonstration of a methanol-fueled motorcycle has opened up a whole new sector of the Indian automobile industry to reduce high dependence on conventional fossil fuels. Moreover, this technology requires manageable modifications in existing engine hardware and software. Royal Enfield (Eicher Motors) and Hero MotoCorp are the industrial partners for this project, and hopefully, the prototype will be further developed by these companies for commercial implementation.