ID 232

The spray characteristics of ethanol-biodiesel-diesel blended fuel (B10E10)

Manida Tongroon
National Metal and Materials Technology Center (MTEC)
Thailand

Sakda Thongchai
Graduate School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ulsan
South Korea

Nuwong Chollacoop
National Metal and Materials Technology Center (MTEC)
Thailand

Ocktaeck Lim
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ulsan
South Korea

Abstract:

Ethanol had been studied to mix with diesel to reduce the use of petroleum-based fuel and decrease ex-haust gas emission such as soot. The major problem to apply ethanol into diesel fuel is the phase separation. An additive, a co-solvent or an emulsifier, is required. Because biodiesel consists of polar tail at one end and non-polar molecule at another, therefore, biodiesel can improve the phase stability of the blends. This study has investigated the spray characteristics of diesel fuel when blended with ethanol and biodiesel, known as diesohol or E-diesel. As the test fuel, B10E10 is the blend between 90% of B10 (10% biodiesel blended with diesel) and 10% of ethanol content (E10). For comparison, neat diesel and B10 were also experimented. The test fuels were injected into the constant volume combustion chamber (CVCC), filled with nitrogen gas to control the ambient pressure. Injection pressures were set up at 600, 900 and 1200 bar to simulate the low, medium and high load condition. Injection duration was kept constant at 800 µsec to observe the spray formation. In addition, the ambient pressures were varied at 30 and 50 bar. The formation of spray was captured by a high-speed camera using the Schlieren technique with the frame speed of 10,000 frame/sec. The spray characteristics were evalu-ated in terms of the spray penetration and cone angle. B10E10 resulted in the shortest penetration length and the larger cone angle. Cavitation phenomena seemed to easily occur when injecting B10E10 fuel.