Dual-fuel engines at part load inevitably suffer from lower thermal efficiency and higher emission of carbon monoxide and unburned fuel. A quasi-two-zone combustion model has been developed for studying the second-law analysis of a dual-fuel (diesel-gas) engine operating under part-load conditions. The model is composed of two divisions: a single-zone combustion model with chemical kinetics for combustion of natural gas fuel and a subsidiary zone for combustion of pilot fuel. In the latter zone, the pilot fuel is considered as a heat source derived from two superposed Wiebe's combustion functions to account for contribution of pilot fuel in ignition of gaseous fuel and the rest of the total released energy. This quasi-two-zone combustion model is able to establish the development of combustion process with time and associated important operating parameters, such as pressure, temperature, heat release rate (HRR) and species concentration. The present work is an attempt to investigate the combustion phenomenon from second-law point of view at part load and using exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) to improve the aforementioned problems. Therefore, the availability analysis is applied to the engine from inlet valve closing (IVC) until exhaust valve opening (EVO). Various availability components are identified and calculated separately with crank position. In this paper, the various availability components are identified and calculated separately with crank position. Then the different cases of EGR (chemical, radical and thermal cases) are applied to the availability analysis in dual-fuel engines at part loads. It is found that the chemical case of EGR has negative effect and in this case the unburned chemical availability is increased and the work availability decreases in comparison with baseline engine (without EGR). While the thermal and radical cases have positive effects on the availability terms especially on the unburned chemical availability and work availability. The results show that second-law efficiency is increased by using low amount of radical and thermal cases of EGR. Implications are discussed in detail. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.