An experimental investigation of the effect of liquified petroleum gas addition on dual fuel diesel engine fuelled with pyrolysis waste engine oil

Abstract

Improper disposal of waste engine oil (WEO) affects landfills due to heavy metal contaminants such as lead, copper, zinc, and toxic organic compounds. Hence, this present work motivates to convert hazardous WEO into potential hydrocarbon fuel for energy conversion. A conventional diesel engine was modified into a dual-fuel engine for utilising pyrolysis fuel and LPG for the energy conversion. The main objective of this work was effective controlling of NO and smoke emission during pyrolysis fuel combustion in dual-fuel operation. Initially, WEO was converted into diesel-like fuel in 3 kW electrical pyrolysis reactor. Further, physicochemical characteristics of the pyrolysis fuel to be found using ASTM standards. Due to higher viscosity of the pyrolysis fuel, poor combustion characteristics were identified in a single fuel operation at a rated speed of 1500 rpm under different loading conditions. Therefore, dual-fuel combustion was investigated using three different blends with energy sharing of LPG (20%, 30% and 40%) and PWEO (80%, 70% and 60%) respectively. The results show that 40% energy sharing of LPG simultaneously decreased the smoke and NO by 46.30% and 233 ppm respectively when compared to baseline. Moreover, the penalty of 3.2% lower brake thermal efficiency was observed due to incomplete combustion.