AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ALTERNATIVE FUELS IN A CONSTANT SPEED CI ENGINE

Abstract

Our nation is a developing country, it requires huge amount of energy resource for transportation and agriculture sector. At present diesel is the back bone of transportation and agriculture in India. India imports up to 80% of its total requirement of crude oil from abroad, hence India is dependent upon gulf country for crude oil supply. So, the whole world is focusing on non-conventional energy source now a day because of depleting fuel reservoirs and increasing pollution. The solution of these biggest problems of the whole world is alternative fuels. Di-ethyl ether (DEE) and biodiesel (BD) are considered two of the prospective transportation fuels recently. These are environmentally benign and have good safety. Di-ethyl ether is such a fuel of ethyl group having much similar fuel properties to diesel. High heating value of DEE is further plus point over other alternative fuels. Di-ethyl ether also has a high cetane number which makes it suitable for compression ignition engines. The current study aims to analyse the use of waste cooking oil as an alternate fuel for CI engine, to know performance characteristics of mixed bio-diesel samples (blended with DEE) and to know the best fuel sample for the C.I engine as a fuel. The experiments were done with blends of Di-ethyl ether, waste cooking oil as a biodiesel and diesel in 10%, 15% and 20% ratio by volume. On comparing the performance and emission parameters using various blends, there was reduction in the major pollution agents CO, HC, NOx and negligible increase in CO2. Further, combustion quality is improved when diesel is blended with Di-ethyl ether and waste cooking oil biodiesel because of extra oxygen availability. The performance parameters that measured are torque, power, brake specific fuel consumption, brake specific energy consumption, exhaust gas temperature and brake thermal efficiency. The results were comparable to Petro-diesel operation.