A Study on Production, Performance and Emission Analysis of Tamanu Oil-Diesel Blends in a CI Engine

Bio-fuels are proved to be very good substitutes for the existing petroleum fuels. Biodiesel can be extracted from vegetable oils and waste fats. Trans-esterification is simply described as the chemical breaking of oil using alcohol to form alcohol esters and glycerol. This procedure involves a three step process, acid, alkaline esterification and washing based on FFA content. Then Tamanu oil methyl ester has been blended with diesel fuel in various proportions to check the performance and emission characteristics of a single cylinder four stroke constant speed diesel engine. Diesel and Tamanu oil methyl ester (B10, B20, B30, B40) fuel blends are used for conducting the performance and emission in terms of 25% load increments from no load to full load. Among the blends B20 and B30 have shown a better performance. All blends show reduction in HC, NOx with increase in load. This is due to higher cetane number, calorific value and oxygen content. But, CO has slightly increased than the diesel fuel at all load condition. From experimental investigations show that blending of Tamanu oil methyl esters up to 30% with diesel fuel can be used without any hardware modification in diesel engine and it reduces the harmful emissions.