EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON USE OF ETHANOL AND BIODIESEL BLEND ON A SINGLE CYLINDER DIESEL ENGINE

Diesel engine is most versatile engine which is used as main prime mover in transportation, decentralized electric generation and agricultures sector. The current growth in environmental degradation and limited availability of fossil fuels has been a matter of concern throughout the world. In view of this fact it has become necessary to explore renewable alternative fuel from resources available locally, such as vegetable oils, alcohol, animal fats etc. whose properties are comparable with mineral diesel and it can be used in the existing C.I. engine without any major hardware modification. The present energy scenario has motivated the world scientist to explore non petroleum, renewable and clean fuel which helps in sustainable development. In the present investigation, experimental work has been carried out to analyze the affect of an ethanol blending with biodiesel on the performance, emission and combustion characteristic of pongamia pinnata biodiesel with ethanol as blend of 15%, 20% and 25%. The biodiesel-ethanol blended fuels were prepared by using microemulsification technique and the main properties were determined. The results showed that, with the increasing the percentage of ethanol up to 20% improves the performance of the engine. At full load condition CO emission is higher compared to the biodiesel and its blends. Unburnt hydrocarbon (HC) is more in ethanol blend of 25% (E25BD75) and lowest for BD100. NOx emission first increases and reaches for all the fuels and then decreases. Increasing in the percentage of ethanol in the biodiesel increases the NOx emission. Upto 75% of the load the smoke emission is almost all same for all the fuels but lower for E25BD75 at maximum load. By adding ethanol to the biodiesel improves combustion quality and there is an increase in efficiency with a little penalty of NO emission