An Experimental Way of Assessing the Application Potential of Emulsified Palm Biodiesel Toward Alternative to Diesel

Author(s):  
Biplab K. Debnath ◽  
Ujjwal K. Saha ◽  
Niranjan Sahoo

Amid various methods available to reduce pollutant emissions and to improve performance and combustion characteristics of a diesel engine, emulsified fuel seems to be promising. However, because of its different properties from diesel, a biodiesel emulsion is incompetent to provide standard diesel performance. Once combusted in a diesel engine; the proper adjustment of engine operating parameters with the presence of “micro-explosion” may amend the performance of a biodiesel emulsion run engine. In order to realize this fact, a comprehensive study has been carried out in a variable compression ratio diesel engine running with two-phase water in a palm biodiesel emulsion. The engine operating parameters studied and optimized are compression ratio (CR), injection timing (IT), and load. The water emulsions of palm oil methyl ester (WIP) with various specifications have been prepared by commercially available surfactants with appropriate HLB values. Water quantity (5% and 10%), surfactant quantity (1%, 2%, and 3%), and HLB values (4.3, 5, and 6) are the parameters optimized to attain the stable WIP by means of mean droplet diameter measurement and stability study. The optimized WIP of 5% water, 3% surfactant of 6 HLB is then tested in a diesel engine at varying CR (17, 17.5, and 18) and IT (20, 23, and 28 deg BTDC). For each of the combinations of CR and IT, the load has been varied from idling conditions to full load (12 kg) with an increment of 20% (2.4 kg) and 110% (13.2 kg) of full load. The results are analyzed in the form of performance, combustion, and emission parameters with respect to the baseline diesel run (CR = 17.5 and IT = 23 deg BTDC).

Author(s):  
Bhaskor J. Bora ◽  
Ujjwal K. Saha

Emulsification is one of the proven techniques to control the pollutants of the diesel engines. The present work attempts to explore the effect of injection timing (IT) of pilot fuel and compression ratio (CR) for an emulsified rice bran biodiesel (RBB)–biogas powered dual fuel diesel engine. A two-phase stable water emulsion of rice bran methyl ester has been prepared by optimizing the factors such as water content (5% and 10%), surfactants (3%), and hydrophilic lipophilic balance (HLB) values (4.3, 5, and 6). The stability of the emulsions is determined on the basis of measurement of mean droplet diameter and stability test. For experimentation, a 3.5 kW single cylinder, direct injection (DI), water cooled, variable CR diesel engine is converted into a biogas run dual fuel diesel engine by connecting a venturi gas mixer at the inlet manifold. A set of combinations comprising CRs of 18, 17.5, and 17, and ITs of 23 deg, 26 deg, 29 deg, and 32 deg before top dead centers (BTDC) at different loading conditions are considered. The investigation demonstrates a maximum brake thermal efficiency (BTE) of 23.62% along with a liquid fuel replacement of 82.22% at pilot fuel IT of 29 deg BTDC and CR of 18. For the same combination, CO and HC emissions are found to be least in all the test cases.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Datta Bharadwaz Yellapragada ◽  
Govinda Rao Budda ◽  
Kavya Vadavelli

Purpose The present work aims at improving the performance of the engine using optimized fuel injection strategies and operating parameters for plastic oil ethanol blends. To optimize and predict the engine injection and operational parameters, response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) are used respectively. Design/methodology/approach The engine operating parameters such as load, compression ratio, injection timing and the injection pressure are taken as inputs whereas brake thermal efficiency (BTHE), brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC), carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons (HC), oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and smoke emissions are treated as outputs. The experiments are designed according to the design of experiments, and optimization is carried out to find the optimum operational and injection parameters for plastic oil ethanol blends in the engine. Findings Optimum operational parameters of the engine when fuelled with plastic oil and ethanol blends are obtained at 8 kg of load, injection pressure of 257 bar, injection timing of 17° before top dead center and blend of 15%. The engine performance parameters obtained at optimum engine running conditions are BTHE 32.5%, BSFC 0.24 kg/kW.h, CO 0.057%, HC 10 ppm, NOx 324.13 ppm and smoke 79.1%. The values predicted from ANN are found to be more close to experimental values when compared with the values of RSM. Originality/value In the present work, a comparative analysis is carried out on the prediction capabilities of ANN and RSM for variable compression ratio engine fuelled with ethanol blends of plastic oil. The error of prediction for ANN is less than 5% for all the responses such as BTHE, BSFC, CO and NOx except for HC emission which is 12.8%.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norhidayah Mat Taib ◽  
Mohd Radzi Abu Mansor ◽  
Wan Mohd Faizal Wan Mahmood

Blending diesel with biofuels, such as ethanol and palm oil methyl ester (PME), enhances the fuel properties and produces improved engine performance and low emissions. However, the presence of ethanol, which has a small cetane number and low heating value, reduces the fuel ignitability. This work aimed to study the effect of injection strategies, compression ratio (CR), and air intake temperature (Ti) modification on blend ignitability, combustion characteristics, and emissions. Moreover, the best composition of diesel–ethanol–PME blends and engine modification was selected. A simulation was also conducted using Converge CFD software based on a single-cylinder direct injection compression ignition Yanmar TF90 engine parameter. Diesel–ethanol–PME blends that consist of 10% ethanol with 40% PME (D50E10B40), D50E25B25, and D50E40B10 were selected and conducted on different injection strategies, compression ratios, and intake temperatures. The results show that shortening the injection duration and increasing the injected mass has no significant effect on ignition. Meanwhile, advancing the injection timing improves the ignitability but with weak ignition energy. Therefore, increasing the compression ratio and ambient temperature helps ignite the non-combustible blends due to the high temperature and pressure. This modification allowed the mixture to ignite with a minimum CR of 20 and Ti of 350 K. Thus, blending high ethanol contents in a diesel engine can be applied by advancing the injection, increasing the CR, and increasing the ambient temperature. From the emission comparison, the most suitable mixtures that can be operated in the engine without modification is D50E25B25, and the most appropriate modification on the engine is by increasing the ambient temperature at 350 K.


2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pushpendra Kumar Sharma ◽  
Dilip Sharma ◽  
Shyam Lal Soni ◽  
Amit Jhalani

Excessive use of diesel engines and continuous increase in environmental pollution has drawn the attention of researchers in the area of the compression ignition engine. In this research article, an innovative investigation of the nonroad modified diesel engine is reported with the effective use of the hybrid Entropy-VIKOR approach. Hence, it becomes necessary to prioritize and optimize the performance defining criteria, which provides higher BTE along with lower emission simultaneously. The engine load, injection timing (Inj Tim), injection pressure (Inj Pre), and compression ratio (Com R) were selected as engine operating parameters for experimentation at the constant speed of 1500 rpm engine. The effect on engine performance parameters (BTE and BSEC) and emission (carbon monoxide (CO), total oxide of carbon (TOC), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), hydrocarbon (HC), and smoke) was studied experimentally. The optimum results were observed at load 10.32 kg, Inj Tim 20 deg btdc, Inj Pre 210 bar, and Com R 21:1 at which highest BTE of 22.24% and lowest BSEC of 16,188.5 kJ/kWh were obtained. Hybrid entropy-VIKOR approach was applied to establish the optimum ranking of the nonroad modified diesel engine. The experimental results and numerical simulation show that optimizing the engine operating parameters using the entropy-VIKOR multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) technique is applicable.


2014 ◽  
Vol 659 ◽  
pp. 211-216
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Cristian Nutu ◽  
Constantin Pana ◽  
Alexandru Dobre ◽  
Niculae Negurescu ◽  
Alexandru Cernat

The severe legislation regarding pollution from actual time determine us to find new alternative solutions for diesel engine fuelling. This paper objective is the use of LPG as alternative fuel at a diesel engine in the purpose of pollutant emissions level decreasing in general and especially of NOx and smoke emissions. Is difficult to use LPG as single fuel at the diesel engine because it has an high auto ignition endurance (CN = -3). There are many fuelling methods of the diesel engine with LPG, but the authors of this paper used the diesel-gas method for a 1,5 l engine fuelling. The research followed the establishment of the optimal LPG cyclic dose and the diesel engine adjustments for different engine operating regimen. The paper presents results of some theoretical and experimental investigations of the LPG fuelled diesel engine. Three substitute ratios of diesel fuel with LPG were taken into account for full load and 2000 rpm engine speed. Thus, the NOx emissions decreased with 20-28 % for different substitute ratios of diesel fuel with LPG. The smoke emission decreased with 35-47% for same substitute ratios. LPG fuelling represents a very good solution for a cleaner environment.


Author(s):  
Seppo A. Niemi ◽  
Juha M. Tyrva¨inen ◽  
Mika J. Laure´n ◽  
Va¨ino¨ O. K. Laiho

In the near future, crude oil based fuels must little by little be replaced by biofuels both in the region of the European Union (EU) and in the United States. Bearing this in mind, a Finnish-made off-road diesel engine was tested with a biofuel-diesel fuel blend in the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Laboratory of Turku Polytechnic, Finland. The biofuel was cold-pressed mustard seed oil (MSO). The engine operation, performance and exhaust emissions were investigated using a blend of 30 mass-% MSO and 70 mass-% diesel fuel oil (DFO). The injection timing of the engine was retarded considerably in order to reduce NOx emissions drastically. The main target was then to find out, whether the blended oxygen containing MSO would speed up the combustion so that the particulate matter (PM) emissions would remain unchanged or even decrease despite the injection retardation. As secondary tasks of the study, the NOx readings of the CLD and FTIR analyzers were compared, and exhaust contents of unregulated compounds were determined. Retarding the injection timing resulted in a significant decrease of NOx emissions, but in an increase in smoke, as expected. At retarded timing, the NOx emissions remained almost unchanged, but the amount of smoke decreased when the engine was run with the fuel blend instead of DFO. At retarded timing at rated speed, the number of ultra-fine particles decreased, but the amount of large particles increased with DFO at full load. At 10% load, however, the particle number increased in the entire particle size range due to retardation. At both loads, the use of the fuel blend slightly reduced larger particles, whereas the number of small particles somewhat increased. At full load at an intermediate speed of 1500 rpm, the PM results were very similar to those obtained at rated speed. At 10% load with DFO, however, the injection retardation led to a higher number of larger particles, the smaller particles being at almost an unchanged level. With the fuel blend, the particle number was now higher within almost the whole particle diameter range than with DFO. Considerably higher NO2 contents were usually detected with FTIR than with CLD. The shape of the NOx result curves were rather similar independent of which one of the analyzers was used for measurements. The NOx contents were, however, generally some ten ppms higher with FTIR. The exhaust contents of unregulated compounds were usually low.


Author(s):  
Biplab K. Debnath ◽  
Ujjwal K. Saha ◽  
Niranjan Sahoo

Palm Oil Methyl Ester (POME) is a very promising alternative renewable biofuel. This is because it has a better cetane number and a comparable lower calorific value with respect to its competitors. However, due to difference in molecular composition and hence dissimilar properties, it does not perform proficiently in diesel engine with standard design and operating parameters. Therefore, a study is arranged to realize the effect of compression ratio variation on POME run in diesel engine. The load is varied from ‘no load’ to ‘full load’ with six equal intervals. During this study, standard diesel injection timing is maintained unaffected. The study conveys that at higher compression ratio, POME causes reduction in brake fuel consumption and thereby increases the engine efficiency. The increase in compression ratio also causes smoother combustion, lower ignition delay with early heat release than diesel operation. The detrimental emission quantities in the form of carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbon emissions are also cut down with presence of POME in the diesel engine at high compression ratio. Thus, POME can be regarded as a good alternative fuel for diesel engine for locomotive applications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed A. Fayad ◽  

Engine injection strategy and renewable fuel both can improve nitrogen oxides (NOX) and smoke/soot emissions in a common-rail compression ignition (CI) diesel engine. The effects of different postinjection (PI) timings (15, 30, and 45) after top dead center (aTDC) and injection pressures (550 and 650 bar) on pollutant emissions and smoke/soot emissions were investigated for combustion of a renewable fuel (soybean biodiesel). The results showed that the levels of carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons (HCs), and NOX are reduced from the combustion of soybean biodiesel compared to the diesel fuel combustion for different injection strategy. Besides, NOX emission is clearly reduced with retarded PI timing, especially at 45°. It is found that the increasing injection pressure reduced gaseous emissions for both fuels. The combination between biodiesel fuel and injection strategy can provide meaningful improvements in pollutant emissions, as well as enhance the exhaust temperature compared to the diesel fuel. With biodiesel fueling, smoke/soot emissions were reduced from biodiesel combustion (by 19.7%) under different fuel injection timings and pressures rather than from the diesel fuel combustion (by 12.2%).


This paper represents the relative performance of a small single-cylinder diesel engine having capacity 3.5 kW. This paper covers experimental investigations of most influencing combustion parameters such as compression ratio, injection pressure and start of injection timing and their values on performance, emission and combustion characteristic of the small single-cylinder CRDI diesel engine for which the mechanical fuel injection system retrofitted with a simple version of the CRDI system. CRDI has yielded good results for large diesel and petrol engines but still not incorporate for cheaper small single-cylinder engines, typically used in the agricultural sector and decentralized power sector for a country like India. It is observed that starts of injection timing and injection pressure are the key parameters for improving the combustion characteristics and therefore engine performance while compression ratio mainly affects the emission characteristics of the engine. Retrofitted CRDI system yielded improved exhaust emission and performance of the engine.


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