Performance, combustion and emission analysis of microalgae Spirulina in a common rail direct injection diesel engine

In the present work, a numerical investigation has been performed on the engine characteristics of a compression ignition (C.I.) engine using D100 (diesel) and AB100 (Algae-biodiesel) as fuels at various compression ratios (16.5-18.5). A commercial numerical software Diesel-RK was used for the simulation work of a direct injection diesel engine. The fluid flow inside the combustion chamber of engine plays a significant role in conducting the performance of an internal combustion engine. Experiments were conducted on the test engine with the optimum compression ratio of 17.5 at full load conditions and the results were compared with the numerical model. The numerical results were found to have respectable treaty against the experimental results. The simulation was carried out for predicting the parameters such as cylinder pressure, exhaust gas temperature, brake thermal efficiency, specific fuel consumption along with the emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter at a constant engine speed under 100% load condition. The results indicated that the use of AB100 reduced brake thermal efficiency by 2.73%, torque by 6.66%, exhaust gas temperature by 1.6%, carbon dioxide by 6.1%, nitrogen oxide by 0.5% and particulate matter by 60%. However, the specific fuel consumption at CR 17.5 was increased by 6.4% as compared to diesel.