Quantity and quality of marine dual-fuel engine’s exhaust sensible waste heat considering different sulfur content in fuels

Maritime transport is facing a set of technical challenges due to implementation of ecological criterions on 1st Jan. 2020 and 2021 by the International Maritime Organization. The advantageous properties of natural gas (NG) as fuel in conjunction with dual-fuel (DF) internal combustion engines (ICE) potentially enables the fulfilment of all criterions. Moreover the 2020 global sulfur cap in combination with its low content in NG potentially enables to recover higher rates of waste heat and exergy of exhaust gas without the risk of low temperature corrosion. In this study the influence of sulfur content in NG and pilot fuel oil (PFO) on the sulfuric acid condensation temperature was investigated in order to determine the rate of waste heat (quantity) and exergy (quality) of four-stroke DF IC engine’s exhaust for 50%, 85% and 100% of engine load. Determined parameters were compared with two sets of reference values calculated for the same engine: a) fueled with NG and PFO with fixed minimum exhaust temperature set as 423.15 K, b) fueled with 3.5% sulfur mass fraction fuel oil only with variable minimum exhaust gas temperature. The results show that the assumption of case a) can lead to significant reduction of recovered rates of exhaust waste heat and exergy in the ranges of 10% to 24% and 43% to 57%, respectively. Higher values were obtained for case b) where the ranges of unrecovered rate of heat and exergy achieved 20% to 38% and 60% to 70%.