The production of the hydro-processed renewable diesel (HRD) and its performances from a turbo-charged diesel engine

Abstract

The development of the hydro-processed renewable diesel (HRD) is proposed in this study based on a lab-scale fixed-bed catalytic reactor. The HRD was produced at temperature of 380 °C, pressure of 6 MPa, weight hourly space velocity (WHSV) of 4.5 h−1 and hydrogen-to-oil ratio of 1000. The performance and emission characteristics of the pure diesel (D100), HRD blended diesel (20% HRD in diesel, H20) and biodiesel (20% biodiesel fuel blend, B20) have been evaluated with the help of turbo-charged diesel engine setup under steady-state operations. Investigations were conducted on regulated emissions including CO, CO2, HC, NOx and smoke. The addition of HRD did not evidently reveal a high impact on CO and NOx emissions. Compared with D100, the CO2 emissions of adding HRD have been reduced by 7.4%. The HC emissions for H20 were relatively lower than those for D100, especially at high engine speeds. Compared with the addition of biodiesel, the smoke reduction of HRD was more significant. The overall average opacity of D100 and B20 were 4.055% and 2.689%, respectively, while the overall average opacity of H20 was only 0.277%. The engine using B20 or H20 mixed fuel can achieve performance close to that of the engine using D100 fuel, since the braking thermal efficiency was close to a value of about 34%. H20 fuel provided better combustion stability than D100 since the average coefficient of variation (COV) of H20 was 0.81% and the average COV of D100 was 0.90%. H20 is better than pure diesel and B20 in terms of engine performance.