Abstract
The world is moving towards renewable energy sources rapidly and, at present, fossil fuels are reducing day by day. In this scenario, biofuels have become an attractive alternative to conventional diesel fuels. In the present work, the vaporization of Thumba biodiesel is numerically modeled using the finite volume-based approach in ANSYS Fluent and the results are compared with diesel fuel. Evaporation of fuels is governed by the conservation equations of energy, momentum, and mass. Owing to high temperature and pressure conditions, turbulence is present in the engine cylinder. To account for the turbulence effects, the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) turbulence model is used. Heat transfer to droplet and mass lost by the droplets is governed by the discrete phase model equations. The obtained results include the droplet lifetime, increase in temperature of a droplet, and velocity profiles. It is observed that the size and temperature of fuel droplets and ambient temperature have a significant effect on the evaporation time of fuel droplets in the engine cylinder. By reducing the droplet size, the complete evaporation of fuels can be achieved. Droplets having a high temperature have a short evaporation time and high evaporation rate. It is noted that, at a higher temperature, biodiesel evaporates more quickly than diesel fuel, thus producing complete combustion and hence giving maximum power output.
Highlights
The consumption of fossil fuels is increasing day by day throughout the world owing to the increase in the population of countries, which has increased the energy demand drastically [1].To reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, industries are trying to shift the burden of fuels from traditional fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources, which can be used for a longer period with less pollution to the environment [2,3]
For the engine designed for heavy-duty work and high torque, the temperature ranges up to 973 K in the compression stroke
The result of the present model is close to the experimental work in Chauveau et al [34] as compared with the numerical model of Abramzon and Sirignano [35]. This may be because of the fact that, in the present model, turbulence effects are taken into account by applying a realizable k-epsilon model, and this is the reason for obtaining the results closer to the experimental work
Summary
The consumption of fossil fuels is increasing day by day throughout the world owing to the increase in the population of countries, which has increased the energy demand drastically [1]. The study [16] of two alcohol fuels, butanol and ethanol, was conducted to observe the effects on the engine performance, combustion, and emissions in the compression ignition engines. Biodiesel consists of up to 11% oxygen and a very small amount of aromatic hydrocarbons Another characteristic that makes the biofuel attractive for compression ignition engines is a high cetane number, owing to which complete combustion takes place in the engine cylinder and emissions are reduced [17,18]. The studies presented above are the experimental studies that do not account for the detailed processes that occur in the engine cylinder before and after combustion, including the spray penetration, breakup, and evaporation of fuel droplets. ANSYS Fluent is used to simulate the complete process in the engine cylinder
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