Authors:Â V. Naresh, S.Prabhakar, K Annamala
Abstract:Â Due to shortage of petroleum, diesel fuel and its increasing cost an alternate source of fuel for diesel is very much needed. It has been found that vegetable oils hold special promise in this regard, since they can be produced from the plants grown in rural areas. Vegetable oil from crops such as soybean, peanut, sunflower, jatropha, mahua, neem, rape, coconut, karanja, cotton, mustard, linseed and castor have been tried in many parts of the world, which lack petroleum reserves as fuels for compression ignition engines. In this project esterified ALGAE oil is used as an alternate fuel. At present neither ALGAE oil nor bio-diesel of ALGAE oil is available in the market. Hence for our work, well grown ALGAE seeds are collected from different parts of Tamil Nadu (India). Approximately 16 liters of oil is obtained from the 45 kgs of ALGAE seed. Then after proper filtration, esters of ALGAE oil are prepared using the bio-diesel plant available in the department. A single cylinder stationary kirloskar engine is used to compare the performance and emission characteristics between pure diesel and ALGAE blends. The ALGAE oil blends are in percentage of 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% of ALGAE oil to 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% & 0% of diesel. In this project selection of suitable ALGAE blend and selection of optimized injection pressure for the blend is done.
From this project it is concluded that among all ALGAE and diesel blends 20% of ALGAE and 80% of diesel blend with injection pressure 240 bar gives better performance nearing the diesel. When comparing the emission characteristics HC, CO is reduced when compared to diesel, however NOx emission is slightly increased when compared to diesel. Hence ALGAE blend can be used in existing diesel engines with minimum modification in the engine. It also describes the usage of non-edible oil to a greater extent.
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