Fuel effect on vehicular gas turbine engine performance

The turboshaft gas turbine engine is a good competitor for the piston engines for vehicular applications. This is due to the many attractive qualities of the gas turbine, especially high power density, lack of spark and diesel knocks, and the ability to burn a wide range of fuels. In this work, a simple turboshaft engine with a free turbine driving dynamometer was used, with different fuels such as kerosene, gas oil, methanol and methanol-kerosene blend being burnt. The full range of power was covered by the tests. Methanol was found to give nearly twice the specific fuel consumption with kerosene, due to the lower calorific value. However, gas oil gave a comparative performance with kerosene. The specific fuel consumption is expected to improve significantly when a full scale engine of optimum cycle is used.