Combustion performance of firing biodiesel from waste cooking oil in an oil burner

Abstract

Depletion of fossil fuels, concerns on the environment, and the fluctuating fuel price have become the major drives in searching for sustainable alternative fuel. With these regards, a study was conducted to develop alternative diesel fuel from waste cooking oil (WCO) through esterification and transesterification processes. The study involves production of WCO biodiesel, characterisation of fuel physical properties, and determination of combustion temperature and gaseous emissions. Several fuel blends are used in the combustion test, i.e. petroleum diesel fuel, WCO B5, WCO B15, and WCO B25. Combustion test is conducted under several equivalence ratios which are 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 to examine the combustion performance in the lean, stoichiometric, and rich conditions. The results suggest that increasing the percentage of WCO biodiesel in the fuel blends causes the wall temperature to decrease due to lower energy content in WCO biodiesel. Significant improvements in the emissions of NOx, SO2, and CO are observed with 7.27%, 37.5%, and 54.5% reductions respectively for WCO B25 at equivalence ratio of 1.0. Findings from this study show that WCO biodiesel blend is a promising alternative to diesel fuel.