Investigations on the effect of Waste fried oil methyl ester blends and load on performance and smoke opacity of diesel engine using response surface methodology

Aim of this study was to investigate effect of parameters like blend and load on the performance and emission characteristics of single cylinder direct injection diesel engine using waste fried oil methyl ester (WFOME). As far as the application in rural agricultural sector of a developing country is concerned, such engines should preferably utilize alternative fuels of bio-origin, which are locally available. Two input parameters, that is, blend and load, were varied and responses such as Brake Thermal Efficiency (BTE), Brake Specific Fuel Consumption (BSFC), Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT), and smoke opacity(OP) were investigated. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was employed for modeling and analysis of response parameters to evaluate the characteristics of the engine. The experiments were designed using a statistical tool known as Design of Experiments (DoE) based on RSM. Engine-operating parameters were optimized using the Desirability approach of RSM.Finally, model optimized results were validated experimentally. The performance parameters for different WFOME blends were found close to diesel, and emission characteristics of the engine improved significantly. A blend of B20 and brake load of 2.5 kW were found to be optimal input parameters for the WFOME blended with diesel in the test engine of 5 HP at 1500 rpm. (C) 2014 Jagannath Hirkude. 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/).