Sustainable Biofuels for Automotive Applications

Abstract

Biodiesel is a renewable, nontoxic, eco-friendly and sustainable alternative fuel for compression ignition engine. The present work essentially consists of production and use of biodiesel fuel obtained from Castor, Coconut, Linseed, Mahua, and Neem oil to run the VCR engine and also study the effect of storage time of biodiesel blends on the performance and emission of VCR engine. The production of biodiesel on transesterification unit using crude oil, alcohol (methanol), acid catalyst (H2SO4 for esterification) and base catalyst (NaOH for transesterification) has been done in I.C. Engine laboratory at Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India. The performance evaluation on VCR engine was done to analyze the performances like brake thermal efficiency, mechanical efficiency, exhaust gas temperature, brake power and compared with pure diesel. This test rig uses single cylinder, 4 stoke, water cooled variable compression engine. The experiment was performed at different blending ratio and different compression ratio 15–18 with varying load on VCR engine running with pure diesel and biodiesel blending. For emissions, gas analyzer was used, which measures carbon mono oxide, hydrocarbon, oxides of nitrogen of pure diesel and biodiesel. Properties like viscosity, density, calorific value, flash point and fire point were measured of biodiesel. For analyzing the fatty acid composition of different biodiesel, gas chromatographic was used that consists of supelcowax type column for flame ionization detection phenomenon. © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved