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As global climate change concerns lead the automotive industry to push towards manufacturing more sustainable automobiles, a number of technologies and powertrains have developed. Less common among these new powertrains are fuel cell systems due to their relatively high cost and requirement of an associated fuel reformation process. This reformer is needed if widely available hydrocarbon fuels are to be used. There are currently few initiatives combining fuel cell systems with internal combustion engines, but these initiatives are unable to mitigate the primary drawbacks of fuel cell systems. Current designs place the engine downstream of the fuel cells, resulting in the same need for prior fuel processing. In this work, a configuration is considered in which the engine is placed upstream of the fuel cell system, and its syngas-rich exhaust is fed directly into the fuel cell system for electricity production.

The quest for sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels leads to a growing diversification of the molecular structures of fuel sources. Since ignition is a vital property in the choice of an engine combustion concept, the ability to tailor the ignition behavior of various fuel sources by means of fuel additives is expected to aid the development of fuel-flexible engines. Ethanol is one of the biofuels with a potential to play an important role in the transportation fuel mix of the future. One of the final processes during ethanol production involves distillation in order to minimize the water content. Using wet ethanol in combustion engines could lead to a reduction in the energy consumption during fuel processing. An understanding of fundamental combustion properties of ethanol in the presence of water vapor such as ignition behavior is expected to aid in the design of efficient engine combustion processes.