Experimental investigation on cardanol diesel blends in a single cylinder di diesel engine

Abstract

Energy is the primary source for propulsion of present world in economic as well as social development in both developed and developing countries. Crude oil is the major source for the production of energy in the sectors like agriculture, automobile and industries. Developing countries like India imports crude oil from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as the availability is much lesser than the requirement. As the consumption goes on increases, problems associated with it like, scarcity of crude oil, increased emission of pollutant, global warming, etc also increases. In order to overcome these problems, many research works were going on to find suitable alternative to the crude oil and its by-products. The wide range of research work was reported using diesel biodiesel as an alternative fuel in diesel engines. Biodiesel derived from vegetable source have some merits and demerits when they were used in diesel engine. Many research works were going on to find new biosources that was surplus under the climatic and regional conditions. Further, researches were going on in the endurance test of optimized biodiesel to study the effect of degradation of lubricating oil, wear of engine components, and so on. In this present investigation, experiments conducted in a stationary diesel engine with a new biosource obtained from the constituent of cashew nut shell liquid known as cardanol. Different blends were prepared with base diesel fuel and experimental works were carried out on the performance, emission and combustion characteristics to optimize the suitable blend ratio of cardanol diesel fuel. From the experimental results of combustion, performance and characteristics, it was found that, B40 of cardanol diesel biodiesel blend was optimized as a suitable blend ratio. iv Optimized B40 blend of cardanol diesel fuel was selected to study the degradation of lubricating oil in the endurance test mode in on-road testing method. In the experimental work, single cylinder, four stroke, diesel eng