Abstract

An ANN model was developed by the authors and tested against experimental data available for an engine as supplied in the manual by the manufacturers. The model was found to perform excellently well by showing similar trends of performance for this engine as well as other engines for which the necessary data was available. This model was then used to perform some parametric studies to improve the performance of an engine using LPG (mainly Propane C3H8) as a fuel. This paper presents discussion on some of the parameters that affect the engine’s thermal efficiency with suggestions to improve it. The effect of equivalence ratio, compression ratio and spark plug location at different speeds on the thermal efficiency have been studied. Based on the engine and the range of variables studied it was found that the best spark plug location was 0.395 for all equivalence ratios studied at CR = 9.

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