PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A DIESEL ENGINE WITH VARYING SHIMS CONFIGURATION FOR DIFFERENT BLENDS OF DIESEL AND ETHANOL

Environmental concerns and limited amount of petroleum fuels have caused thick interests in the development of renewable fuels as an alternative for internal combustion (IC) engines. This paper presents a report on the performance of an existing diesel engine for different shims configuration with ethanol and its blends with diesel. As the shim thickness reduction leads to injection advance which is the case required for the use of Ethanol as fuel in C.I engines, the purpose of this paper is to find the best shims configuration for Pure Diesel, E20 and E40 blend for an existing diesel engine. The experiments were conducted on a Direct Injection, 553 cc diesel engine of 5 HP. Experimental tests were carried out to study the configuration on the basis of five performance parameters (Mf, AFR, BSFC, Volumetric and Thermal efficiency). The test results show that the 4 shims (0.66 mm) configuration and 6 shims (1.535 mm) configuration are most suitable for pure diesel and no shims (0 mm) configuration for E20 blend. And increase in performance can be further improved by use of lubricates and igniters along with the change in coolant circulation rate to maintain the optimum working temperature of engine. It is also found that CI engine with less compression ratio are not compatible to run on higher blends of ethanol (E60 and above).