Investigation of Performance and Combustion Characteristics of DI Diesel Engine Fuelled with Ternary Fuel Blend at Different Injection Pressure

The depletion of fossil diesel fuels, global warming concerns and strict limits on regulated pollutant emissions are encouraging the use of renewable fuels. Biodiesel is the most used renewable fuel in compression ignition (CI) engine. The majority of literature agrees that the particulate matter (PM), unburnt total hydrocarbons (THC) and carbon dioxide (CO) emission from biodiesel are lower than from conventional diesel fuel. One of the most important reasons for this is the oxygen content of the biodiesel. This induces a more complete and cleaner combustion process. In addition to this the absence of aromatic compounds in biodiesel leads to particulate matter reduction with respect to diesel fuel. The potential emission benefits induced by the presence of oxygen in fuel molecules has increased the interest in using the bio-alcohols fuel blends in CI engines such as ethanol. Although alcohols are more suitable for blending with diesel fuel, properties like lubricity, viscosity, stability, heating value and cetane number of diesel-alcohol (Diesohol) still require improvement. One of the techniques is addition of biodiesel which can improve all of these properties forming diesel-biodiesel-alcohol (ternary) blends. The blends of diesel-biodiesel-ethanol can be used in the existing CI engines without any major modifications and most significant result of using this blend is the lower emission with almost the same performance as of diesel fuel alone. The present study focused on investigation of performance and combustion characteristics of ternary fuel blend in DI diesel engine operating at different injection opening pressure (IOP). The different injection opening pressures are: 180 bar, 200 bar and 220 bar.