Performance Analysis of Diesel Engine with Blends of Waste Vegetable Oil and Diesel

Diesel engines are generally heavy duty vehicles used in transportation and agricultural sectors. Diesel engines meet their energy requirement from natural petroleum products. The problems associated with diesel fuels are their increasing price, atmospheric pollution and lack of sufficient availability in next few years. The vegetable oils stands as alternate fuels for natural fuels as physical and combustion properties are close to the diesel fuel. However the viscosity of the vegetable oils is higher than diesel fuel. In the present investigation waste sunflower oil is taken as alternate fuel. The high viscosity of sun flower oil is decreased by blending with diesel in various proportions and heated prior to the combustion in the cylinder. The fuel blends were heated by means of the cooling water of the engine. The blends of the varying proportions of sunflower oil and diesel were prepared, analysed and compared with diesel fuel. The effect of temperature on the viscosity of fuel blends was also studied. The performance of the engine using fuel blends were evaluated in a single cylinder C I engine and compared with the performance obtained with the pure diesel. The experiments were performed on the four stroke engine at various loads by maintaining constant speed. The fuel blends supplied to the engine are S 10 (10% of sunflower oil and 90% of diesel), S 25, S 50.It is observed that the performance of the engine is almost same up to S 25 fuel blend without much preheating, compared to pure diesel engine. The maximum brake thermal efficiency obtained is 30.3% for S 25 blend while it is 32.6% for pure diesel. The brake specific fuel consumption and maximum exhaust temperature obtained were 0.262 kg/kWh and 292 C respectively for S 25 fuel blend, while they are 0.248 kg/kWh and 242 C for pure diesel.