TELL ME ABOUT CNG engines IN DETAILS AND THEIR PROJECTS?

Question

TELL ME ABOUT CNG engines IN DETAILS AND THEIR PROJECTS?

Answer 1

CNG means Compressed Natural Gas. It is the same gas that you use at home to cook and heat. And a regular car engine can burn natural gas quite well, with minor adjustments. In fact, the modern gasoline engine was adapted from an earlier engine that burned natural gas.

Answer 2

CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and Natural gas engines have been in use for many decades. They work well, but have some limitations in cars and trucks due primarily to safety and availability of compressed gas stations to refill.

They are used extensively for stationary locations like back-up generators, emergency fire pumps, etc. where natural gas is available

Answer 3

The only natural gas-powered car commercially available right now is the Honda Civic GX

http://autos.yahoo.com/honda_civic_gx_ng...

It gets a Yahoo green rating almost as good as the Prius (86 vs. 85), though it costs about $4000 more.  On top of that, you have to lease the fueling system equipment to get the natural gas from your home into the car.  It is cheap to fuel up - owners claim it's an equivalent of about $1.25/gallon, and it gets an equivalent of about 34 mpg.

So you're getting about 3.5 cents/mile, as opposed to a gas-burning car at about 10 cents/mile (electric cars get 2-3 cents/mile, Prius gets about 6 cents/mile).  This makes up for the initial price and equipment cost to some degree.

The other issue is that natural gas is still a limited resource like oil, though it does burn cleaner.  It's not a fuel on which we want to rely to a very great extent because our natural gas reserves would deplete very fast if a large percentage of our cars used it as fuel.

Answer 4

natural gas for automobiles (and propane) is an alright option.

the plus side it burns clean, so the engine and oil last longer.

the down side is lack of filling stations. (although you could use your house supply, long distance is an issue.)

also poor fuel economy. since CNG and LPG are more hydrogen, they produce less power than gasoline, which contains more carbon.

the other issue is tank considerations. they are big and bulky. therefore won't fit in many cars.

also the conversion is expensive.

gasoline is plentiful, and readily available.

we just need more refineries to process it!

the marketplace sorted these issues out long ago- electric, gasoline, steam, etc.

gasoline won hands down.

Answer 5

CNG compressed natural gas engine is a 4 stroke engine like a 4 stroke petrol engine except the fuel that is  natural gas in place of petrol.  The engine is made to reduce the pollution created due to the usage of petrol. The tank can explode if the fuel filling is not done carefully or the tank itself is not designed properly. The engine is very efficient at present and giving good milage for the user.

Answer 6

CNG: A big mistake?



PROF DINESH MOHAN

[ TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2002  12:19:00 AM ]



he Supreme Court has reaffirmed that buses in Delhi shall use only CNG as fuel, and this has started off another round of anti and pro-CNG debates.

This is unfortunate. To be fair, one must look not only at the pollution caused per vehicle but also at the pollution caused per passenger transported over a kilometre.

This is why it is very important that fuel policies must be accompanied by other policies that ensure that use of public transport does not decrease.

Our estimates show that even if all buses in Delhi used CNG, and if only 5 per cent people stopped using buses and shifted to private modes, total carbon monoxide and hydro-carbon pollution would increase by 10-20 per cent.

If 15 per cent of bus users start using two-wheelers then the particulate pollution will also increase even if all buses use CNG.

A recent study by Lew Fulton of the International Energy Agency states that “Dramatic reductions in road space, fuel use, and most emissions can be achieved just with (shifts to) standard buses… The additional reduction from improving this bus is mostly trivial, except in the case of NOX and to a lesser extent particulate matter.”

What Dr Fulton is saying is that pollution reductions are very significant if you use large vehicles instead of small vehicles like two-wheelers, cars and vans.

Newspaper reports in Delhi suggest a large number of families have already formed car pools to transport their children to school as bus fares have increased. Similarly, many others who were using chartered buses to go to work have reverted to their cars and two-wheelers.

A very large number of rural transport vehicles have been introduced in Delhi because they come equipped with CNG engines.

But these vehicles carry only 12 passengers. So instead of using one engine (in a bus) to transport 60-80 people we will be using 6 engines on the roads of Delhi.

These changes will increase pollution, congestion and accidents. While other cities are trying to get rid of vans and mini-buses, we are bringing in new ones!

We will now have the bus fleet of Delhi operating on outdated engine technology but using CNG as a fuel.

Further, all 10,000 buses in Delhi will be of the same age and preclude us from adopting new engine technologies or fuels as they develop over the next ten years.

All these buses will have the same old truck chassis with high floors instead of convenient low floor modern urban buses with automatically closing doors for the next 10 years.

This one decision has the potential of destroying the public transport facility of Delhi for a very long time to come.

Policies that are complex in nature should never be put in place through antagonistic processes like courts. Such processes end up destroying institutions, governance procedures and trust in systems.

The committee under the chairmanship of Dr R M Mashelkar, Director-General, CSIR had very sensibly recommended that the government should only specify the quality of the exhaust to be emitted by the bus and not the fuel.

When this is done, everyone competes to give you the most efficient engine at the lowest price that meets the emission norms. They also suggested a phase in timetable so that we don’t have all buses of the same vintage.

The recommendations of this committee seem to have been ignored. This is a very serious matter. No one questions the fact that Dr Mashelkar is one of the most outstanding scientists in India. I have also never heard any backroom chat questioning his integrity.

But when his committee report is ignored, it puts into disrepute the competence of such scientists in the country and questions his competence and integrity.

No society can do well and take well thought out decisions when we promote such cynicism among the public.