Water content determination of steam generated water-in-diesel emulsion

Abstract

Emulsion fuel is one of the prevalent NOx and PM reducing techniques in compression ignition engines. An alternative method to produce emulsion is by mixing steam into diesel involving the condensation of water in the immiscible diesel. The converted steam into water, however, is difficult to determine. Hence, this paper describes a method of estimating the water content of the produced emulsion by using heat balance and Jakob’s number equations. Experiments were performed by using a custom designed 250 ml glass column, where final temperatures of the emulsion were recorded, and distillation of the sample was performed to analyze the water content. The results were compared with the equations where Jakob’s number model delivers a closer estimate of the experimental values (maximum difference 5.90%) than the heat balance equation (maximum difference 7.93%).