Title: Experimental study on the performance, emission and combustion characteristics of rubber seed oil-diesel blends in a DI diesel engine

Authors: V. Edwin Geo, G. Nagarajan, B. Nagalingam

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, GKM College of Engineering and Technology, Chennai 600063, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, 600025, India. ' Department of Automobile Engineering, SRM University, Chennai 603203, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: In the present work, experiments have been carried out to assess the suitability of rubber seed oil and its blends with diesel in a diesel engine. Tests were conducted with different blends of R80-D20 (80% of rubber seed oil and 20% of diesel by volume) and R70-D30 (70% of rubber seed oil and 30% of diesel by volume). Experimental results indicate that the brake thermal efficiency increases from 26.5% to 27.7% with the optimum blend of R70-D30. There is a reduction in emissions is also observed except NO_x level at all loads. Smoke emission reduces drastically from 6.1 to 4.7 BSU. Combustion parameters indicated a decrease in ignition delay and combustion duration compared with neat RSO. This will also contribute to higher heat release rate in the premixed combustion phase. Current investigations reveal that the performance of R70-D30 blend is closer to diesel.

Keywords: blending; combustion; diesel engines; blending; emissions; performance; rubber seed oil; direct injection engines; biodiesel.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRET.2011.040866

International Journal of Renewable Energy Technology, 2011 Vol.2 No.3, pp.306 - 323

Published online: 21 Feb 2015 *

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