Extracting methyl-ester from waste cooking oil for fueling a light duty diesel engine – a dual fuel approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT The intention of this test is to efficiently use waste cooking oils (WCOs) that are used globally for cooking and frying purposes. In most cases, these used cooking oils (UCOs)/WCOs are disposed in an unstandardized manner that can cause soil contamination and may affect the groundwater if disposed in large quantities. Recent studies are exploring new vegetable oils that are surplus available all over the country and are especially non-edible. Most of these oils can be extracted from seeds through transesterification and can be attempted to be used for fueling engines, some of the oils are mahua oil, jatropha, lemongrass oil, mango seed oil, and so on. Alike extraction of vegetable oils from seeds, we can extract useful forms of WCOs in the same technique to make sure WCO can be used in a CI engine. Interesting outputs were witnessed when the WCO and neat diesel (ND) blends were fueled in a dual-fuel (DF) diesel engine. In a DF engine, a volatile liquid or gaseous fuel bearing higher octane value is inducted along with air through the intake manifold and compressed to a temperature less than its self-ignition point. In addition, a pilot fuel (with a higher cetane value) is injected through the conventional injection technique which initiates the combustion in the primary fuel-air mixture. Hydrogen looks very attractive for DF operation as “primary fuel”. As well the pilot fuel is WCO and neat diesel (ND) blends. WCOB was mixed with mineral diesel fuel by a volume fraction of 50% (WCOB50). In addition to this pure hydrogen was inducted into the intake along with air at the volume flow rate of 4, 6 and 8 lpm (liter per minute). Tests were conducted in a single-cylinder farming based direct injection light-duty diesel engine at several load conditions. At first, test results were correlated with ND fuel and WCOB50 fuel at all loads. WCOB50 fuel indicates a negligible reduction in brake thermal efficiency (BTE) when compared to ND fuel. Further, in this test, the influence of hydrogen induction on tailpipe exhaust emissions of a CI engine fueled with WCOB is examined.