Combustion and emission characteristics of palm-oil-based biodiesel in a liquid fuel burner

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the combustion characteristics of palm oil methyl ester (POME) or called as biodiesel (B), in an open-ended combustion chamber or called as open-ended liquid fuel burner. The performance of conventional diesel fuel (CDF) and various percentages of POME and CDF, which are B10 (10% biodiesel) and B30 (30% biodiesel) were studied to evaluate their performance. Combustion temperature profile in the combustion chamber and exhaust emission concentrations such as NOx, CO and SO2 have been carried out using five different equivalent ratios such as Φ = 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2 and 1.4. The results show that as the biodiesel content increased, the emission significantly increased except for the NOx emission. It was also found that higher biodiesel content resulting faster combustion rate at near burner region, especially for Φ = 1.0 due to higher Cetane Number (CN) although the lower overall temperature profile produced compared to CDF alone. This proved the suitability of biodiesel for an enhanced transportation engine performance in the near future.