Performance and Combustion Characteristics of SINGLE Cylinder Diesel Engine Running on Karanja Oil/Diesel Fuel Blends

Siddalingappa R. Hotti, Omprakash Hebbal

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DOI: 10.4236/eng.2011.34042                

Abstract

The present paper investigates the performance and combustion characteristic of single cylinder, natu-rally aspirated, water cooled, DI diesel engine running on karanja oil (K100) and blends with diesel K10, K15, and K20 and the experimental results were compared with that of diesel. The results showed that the fuel properties of K100, density, viscosity, flash point and carbon residue were found to be higher than that of diesel and calorific value is lower than that of diesel. Based on performance and combustion characteristics of the various blends, the optimum blend was found to be K15.

Keywords

Vegetable Oil, Karajan Oil, Combustion Characteristics, Injector Opening Pressure, Injection Timing

1. Introduction

India with the high rate of economic growth and increase in the population is the significant consumer of energy resources. India lacks in sufficient energy reserves and dependent on oil imports, but India has an abundant resource of vegetable oils. The use of vegetable oil in a diesel engine is not a new concept. In fact early engines were demonstrated with straight vegetable oils (SVO). Vegetable oils were proved to be very costlier during those days. However due to limited reserves of fossil fuels, escalation nature of diesel fuel prices and increase in environmental pollution, created a renewed interest of research in vegetable oil as substitute fuel for diesel engines. Vegetable oil is easily available, renewable and environment friendly. However major disadvantage of vegetable oil is its viscosity, which is much higher than that of diesel.

Bajpai et al. [1] tested performance and emission characteristics of karanja SVO blending with diesel and concluded that without major engine modifications blending up to 10 percentages can be utilized in the existing engine. In order to study the effect of injector opening pressure (IOP) on performance, emission and combustion characteristics of diesel engine running on blends of karanja SVO Venkanna et al. [2] estimated the ignition delay period (IDP) and heat release rate at 75% load and found that IDP increases with increase in blend percentage from 20% to 30% and noticed decrease in net heat release rate. Avinash Agarwal et al. [3] carried out experiments on diesel engine running on karanja oil and their blends. Even without preheating engine was running successfully, they concluded that performance and emission characteristics are well comparable with that of diesel and also up to 50% with and without preheating can be used in diesel engines. Other researchers, [4-6] conducted the performance and emission characteristics of karnaja biodiesel.

Karnja is a forest based tree-borne non-edible oil with a, production potential of 135 000 million tones [4]. Karanja tree grows all over the country. In parts of India, this tree is also known as pongamia, belongs to the family of Leguminaceae. It is a medium sized tree that attains a height of about 18 m and a trunk diameter greater than 50 cm. The fresh extracted oil is yellowish orange to brown and rapidly darkens on storage [6].

The objective of this paper is to investigate, performance and combustion characteristics of single cylinder, naturally aspirated, DI diesel engine running on Karanja oil (K100) and its blends K10 (10% Karanja oil blended with 90% diesel on volume basis), K15 (15% Karanja oil blended with 85% diesel on volume basis) and K20 (20% Karanja oil blended with 80% diesel on volume basis).

2. Experimental Setup and Test Procedure

To study the performance and combustion characteristics, a typical computerized four-stroke, single cylinder, water cooled naturally aspirated direct injection diesel engine was selected. The detailed technical specifications of engine are as given in Table 1.

Figure 1 Shows the schematic diagram of engine set up. The setup enables study of engine performance for brake power, indicated power, frictional power, BMEP, IMEP, brake thermal effici-ency, indicated thermal efficiency, mechanical efficiency, volumetric efficiency, specific fuel consump-tion, air fuel ratio, and heat balance. Lab-view based engine performance analysis software package “Engine soft” is provided for on line performance evaluation.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

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