Knock Rating of Gaseous Fuels

The knock tendency in spark ignition engines of binary mixtures of hydrogen, ethane, propane and n-butane is examined in a CFR engine for a range of mixture composition, compression ratio, spark timing, and equivalence ratio. It is shown that changes in the knock characteristics of binary mixtures of hydrogen with methane are sufficiently different from those of the binary mixtures of the other gaseous fuels with methane that renders the use of the methane number of limited utility. However, binary mixtures of n-butane with methane may offer a better alternative. Small changes in the concentration of butane produce almost linearly significant changes in both the values of the knock limited compression ratio for fixed spark timing and the knock limited spark timing for a fixed compression ratio.