Effect of Oxygenated Additives on the Performance and Emissions Characteristics of a Diesel Engine Working with Jatropha Karanja Dual Blended Biodiesel

Abstract

The rapid consumption of petroleum diesel due to large scale application in agricultural, transportation, power generation and industrial sector has put up a threat of depletion in near future. newlineThe biodiesel has been considered as a potential replacement of diesel in past few decades owing to their thermos-physical properties similar to pure diesel. The biodiesel are primarily newlinederived from feedstocks including edible and non-edible oils, animal fats and microalgae. newlineThis study investigates the performance and emission attributes of a variable compression newlineratio (VCR) diesel engine employing a dual blended biodiesel derived from jatropha and newlinekaranja oil. The two-stage transesterification process including acid esterification and alkaline newlinetransesterification has been adopted for extraction of respective methyl esters from the newlineraw oils. The test fuel blends were prepared having 5, 10, 15 and 20% each of jatropha and newlinekaranja oil and the rest being pure diesel. The test fuel blends were used as fuel in a laboratory newlinescale single cylinder, four stroke variable compression ratio diesel engine to estimate newlinetheir performance, emission and combustion attributes. The experimental investigations were newlinecarried out at a constant speed of 1500 rpm with variable load ranging from 0 to 100% on an newlineincreasing step of 20%. The brake thermal efficiency (BTE) and brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) have been considered for performance estimation while the unburnt hydrocarbon,carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen have been considered for exhaust emission. The experimental results indicated the biodiesel blend B20 consisting of 80% diesel and 10% each of jatropha and karanja oil by volume to be the optimum blend. The B20 blend exhibited 2.2% lower BTE, 0.22 kg/kWh higher BSFC, 29.6% lower hydrocarbon, 20.5% lower carbon monoxide and 2.9% higher nitrogen oxides. newlineThe incorporation of various additives to different biodiesels has been adopted in recent past for enhancement of diesel engine characteristics. The present work has utilized t