Effect of fuel injection pressures on the performance and emission characteristics of D.I. Diesel engine with biodiesel blends cotton seed oil methyl ester.

Abstract

The world’s rapidly dwindling petroleum supplies, their rising cost and the rapid growing of automobile pollutions from fossil petroleum fuels have led to an intensive search for alternative fuels to replace diesel fuel. Agriculture and transport sectors consume maximum percentage of petroleum based fuels where diesel engine happens to be the prime mover. Diesel fuelled vehicles discharge significant amount of pollutants such as CO, UHC, NOx, smoke, etc which are harmful to the environment. There is a wide variety of alternative fuels available as renewable fuels to replace diesel fuel. Vegetable oils, their properties being close to diesel fuel, may be a promising alternative for use in diesel engines. The high viscosity and low volatility of these vegetable oils are the major problems for their use in diesel engines. Such problem can be solved by the process of transesterification. In the present work, experiments are conducted on 3.72 kW(5 BHP) single cylinder, four stroke, water-cooled diesel engine using cotton seed oil methyl esters blended with diesel in various proportions to study the engine performance and emissions at different injection pressures. The effect of injection pressure on the performance and emission characteristics for various biodiesel blends of 0BD, 10BD, 20BD, 30BD and 100BD at six different test pressures of 170, 180, 190, 200, 210 and 220 bar are studied. The experimental investigations reveal that the better performance and emission characteristics among the biodiesel blends are obtained at injection pressure of 200 bar with 20BD of cotton seed oil methyl ester.