Experimental Investigation on Performance and Emission Characteristics of a Diesel Engine Fuelled with Mahua Biodiesel Using Additive

The present paper investigates about the production of biodiesel from neat Mahua oil via base catalyzed transesterification and mixing of the biodiesel with a suitable additive (Dimethyl carbonate) in varying volume proportions in order to prepare a number of test fuels for engine application. The prepared test fuels are used in single cylinder water cooled diesel engine at various load conditions to evaluate the performance and emission parameters of the engine. The results of investigation show increase in brake power and brake thermal efficiency with load for all prepared test fuels. It is also noticed that brake thermal efficiency increases with the percentage of additive in all the test fuels. The brake specific fuel consumption decreases with increase in additive percentage. Exhaust gas temperature increases almost linearly with load for all test fuels and decreases with increase in additive percentage. It is also seen from the results that both CO and HC emissions tend to decrease with increase in additive percentage in biodiesel. The smoke and NOx emissions also decrease with increase in additive percentage in the biodiesel fuel. During the course of this experimental investigation it was found that the overall performance and emission characteristics of the engine was satisfactory with all the test fuels and improved with repeated experiments. All the test results significantly improved with increase in the additive percentage in biodiesel. Therefore the present paper provides a strong platform to continue further investigation on using biodiesel fuel in a diesel engine with variety of fuel additives under varying engine operating parameters. (C) 2014 Bhabani Prasanna Pattanaik. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).