Scholarly record
ON THE POSSIBILITY OF RETROFITTING AN AGRICULTURAL DIESEL ENGINE TO DUAL-FUEL LPG-DIESEL OPERATION USING AN ANALYSIS BASED ON THE TAGUCHI METHOD
Abstract
Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)-assisted retrofitting of diesel engines remains attractive, but exhaustive dual-fuel bench mapping is costly and engine-specific. This paper presents a simulation-guided prioritization workflow for retrofitting the UTB 2404055 agricultural diesel engine to LPG-diesel operation. An AVL BOOST 1D model of a dual-fuel architecture with multi-point LPG port injection and direct diesel pilot injection was calibrated and validated against eight measured diesel baseline points at 1400 and 2400 rpm and 40-100% load. Scalar validation yielded mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values of 1.89% for power, 1.88% for torque, 1.82% for brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC), 2.23% for soot, and 0.07% for nitrogen oxides (NOx), while pressure-trace validation over 300-420 deg CA gave 3.86 bar root mean square error (RMSE), 7.69% MAPE, and coefficient of determination (R2) = 0.946. The validated diesel-baseline model was then used predictively to screen a full-factorial 3x2x4 Design of Experiments (DoE) matrix with LPG energy fractions (XLPG) of 0%, 20%, and 40%. Operating-point effects were interpreted by descriptive factor decomposition and Taguchi-type signal-to-noise (S/N) analysis, and final point selection used equal-weight Grey relational ranking with load-match filtering. Across the screened domain, LPG reduced BSFC by 2.5-6.4% and soot by 19.8-55.3%, while NOx increased and carbon monoxide (CO) remained load-dependent. Two regimes emerged as bench candidates: 1400 rpm/80% load as the best global compromise and 2400 rpm/100% load as the performance-oriented frontier. The contribution is therefore not experimental validation of LPG-diesel operation, but an experimentally anchored workflow for reducing dual-fuel test matrices before bench validation.
Publication details
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