Investigation of Compression Ignition Engine Characteristics with Gaseous and Liquid Biofuels
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2023
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Abstract
Due to global population growth, energy demand has surged, especially in developing countries with dispersed rural communities. Consequently, the centralized grid system is unable to keep up with the escalating energy demand, leading to electricity shortage. Moreover, providing affordable electricity to remote areas is a challenge. Hence, decentralized power in these regions has been becoming an increasingly important issue. Power generation using fossil diesel in compression ignition engines (CI) is an old practice in remote locations of developing nations. However, the use of diesel engines leads to over exploitation of conventional fuels causing concern over environmental degradation. Hence, there is a huge demand for generating remote electricity by utilizing available renewable resources with the help of existing diesel engines. Dual fuelling of a conventional diesel engine is a mode of combustion which involves a small pilot injection of high cetane liquid fuel that ignites a pre-mixed combination of high octane gaseous fuel and air. The liquid fuel is called the pilot fuel and the gaseous fuel is called the primary fuel. The use of biofuels (liquid and gaseous form) can provide a clean alternative substitute for conventional diesel in dual fuel (DF) engines. Biogas (BG) and producer gas (PG) have emerged as a low cost renewable fuels. Both BG and PG have their own advantages and limitations to be used as a primary fuel for DF operations. Operations in DF mode individually with BG and PG exhibits inferior combustion characteristics compared to conventional diesel. However, these gases possess high anti-knocking properties and they have the potential to control the exhaust emissions. Moreover, combining these two gases might subdue each other’s limitations when introduced to the DF engines. Therefore, it is important to study the performance and emission characteristics of a DF engine run on BG-PG mixtures under varying operating conditions, namely, load, compression ratio (CR) and injection timing (IT). The present contribution is focused to perform a systematic experimental analysis for a diesel engine powered by BG and PG using biodiesel-diesel blend as pilot fuel. The motivation of this present investigation is to provide a perfect competitive promotion of biodiesel-biogas-producer gas as the alternative fuel for clean energy generation for rural electrification.
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Supervisors: Kalita, Pankaj and Kulkarni, Vinayak