Use of Vegetable Oil as a Fuel in Diesel Engine-A Review

It is an older practice to use vegetable oil as a fuel in diesel engine. Rudolf Diesel introduced vegetable oil as a fuel in compression ignition (CI) engine. In the past few decades' vegetable oils have emerged as an alternative fuel. Vegetable oils can either be non-edible or edible. Examples of Few of the edible oils are soya oil, peanut oil and cottonseed oil. The non-edible oils are mahua oil, jatropha oil, karanj oil, rubber seed oil, neem oil etc. The advantages of using vegetable oil at the place of diesel fuel in the CI engine are explained briefly. The use of vegetable oils as a fuel was found more important due to eco-friendly combustion characteristics and its agricultural origin. The current paper discusses the different steps for processing of vegetable oil, various properties and standards for vegetable oil, storage stability. The use of these vegetable oils into the diesel engine their performance, combustion and emission results reported by several researchers are presented.