Performance and Emission Characteristics of a Direct Injection Diesel Engine using Biodiesel Produced from Karanja Oil

The increasing vehicular population leads to consumption of petroleum fuels at a faster rate. This problem results increase in the danger of petroleum fuels depletion and the remarkable increase in high crude oil prices. The increasing consumption of petroleum products has been a matter of great concern for the country for the financial growth as well as environmental pollution abatement. The situation offers us a challenge as well as opportunity to look for substitutes of fossil fuels by utilizing vegetable oil for both economic and environmental benefits to the country. In the present experimental study, biodiesel produced from Karanja oil (KB) has been selected. It has been tested on single cylinder, four stroke, water cooled, direct injection diesel engine for the performance and emissions using fuel samples containing different blends of KB (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 75% and 100%) and conventional diesel. Engine performance and exhaust emission characteristics have been measured and analyzed. The highest brake thermal efficiency has been found to be 27.99% and lowest brake specific fuel consumption of 0.303kg/kw hr has been found with KB20 blend. It is also found that emissions of carbon monoxide and un-burnt hydrocarbon reduce as load increases for all the blends of biodiesel tested on the engine up to 80% of rated brake load ( i.e. 88.98 N or 20 lbs.) beyond that, these emissions further increase. It has been found that nitrogen oxides emission increases as the brake load increases on the engine up to 80% of rated brake load beyond that it further decreases. This may be due to the presence of oxygen available in biodiesel. Hence biodiesel from karanja oil (pongamia pinnata) can be used as potential alternative fuel in future.