TWO-STROKE ENGINES
WinGD ALT FUELS RESEARCH PICKS UP MOMENTUM Andreas Schmid, WinGD’s General Manager Future Technologies, discussed progress in developing combustion solutions to use ammonia or methanol as fuel in the engine designer’s dual-fuel engines
8 WinGD was conducting research into injection concepts for low-carbon fuels on its RTX-6 test engine in 2020.
When Klaus Heim, ceo of WinGD, told The Motorship in November 2021 that the Winterthur-based engine designer would bring methanol and ammonia-fuelled engines to market by “2024-2025”, the extremely short timescale was almost as noteworthy as the company’s ambition to develop multiple alternative fuel engine platforms in parallel. Andreas Schmid found time during the recent NorShipping conference to provide an update on the solid pace of WinGD’s engine development projects. Schmid began by offering a high-level description of the research team’s approach to mapping out the introduction of a new fuel, which begin from first principles. “As longtime members of the EU Hercules project, our understanding of alternate fuels goes back nearly two decades. We closely study the combustion properties of various alternate fuels within our labs which provides us with a solid understanding of who these fuels will interface with existing engine technology. We begin by understanding how the fuel burns, and then by identifying what we need to do to ensure that the fuel burns in the way we want it to. This influences the hardware requirements, and then we connect them up to the rest of the ship to make sure that this fits perfectly into each vessel.” Turning to WinGD’s methanol research, Schmid notes that methanol – which is basically one molecule with a few smaller molecules – is “rather clean, compared with fuel oil, which is highly complex and sticky and contains hundreds of different components, each of differing lengths with their own boiling curves”.
16 | APRIL 2022
Diesel cycle concept Schmid confirmed that WinGD had selected a Diesel cycle concept for new or retrofitted methanol engines, although the final choice would be influenced by other considerations, such as the emissions profile. Physical tests are ongoing as an essential step to test some of the combustion concepts identified by the combustion simulations. Combustion research to optimising the combustion of methanol is going to be carried out on the engine designer’s single cylinder engine in Winterthur in 2022. “Some of the research will also help us to improve the combustion itself as a key goal” Schmid said, “we know that these new fuels will come at a high price so optimising the combustion is essential for our customers before methanol can be considered a viable choice”, adding that WinGD would be leveraging its in-house expertise with the spray combustion chamber later in 2022. One of the advantages of conducting the spray chamber combustion tests with methanol in-house is that the test data can be used to validate existing digitalised combustion model data (which is primarily based on 4-stroke combustion data). Validating the commercial data was also likely to support the development work of Schmid’s colleagues who are looking at abatement solutions, and the overall environmental impact of the engine in a digital environment. Most importantly, it would also give an understanding of the engine concept’s expected fuel consumption and other performance parameters. A separate team was assessing the hardware concept that the engine designer intended to select, although a final
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