Experimental investigation of a diesel engine with methyl ester of mango seed oil and diesel blends

Petroleum based fuels worldwide have not only resulted in the rapid depletion of conventional energy sources, but have also caused severe air pollution. The search for an alternate fuel has led to many findings due to which a wide variety of alternative fuels are available at our disposal now. The existing studies have revealed the use of vegetable oils for engines as an alternative for diesel fuel. However, there is a limitation in using straight vegetable oils in diesel engines due to their high viscosity and low volatility. In the present work, neat mango seed oil is converted into their respective methyl ester through transesterification process. Experiments are conducted using various blends of methyl ester of mango seed oil with diesel in a single cylinder, four stroke vertical and air cooled Kirloskar diesel engine. The experimental results of this study showed that the MEMSO biodiesel has similar characteristics to those of diesel. The brake thermal efficiency, unburned hydrocarbon and smoke density are observed to be lower in case of MEMSO biodiesel blends than diesel. The CO emission for B25, B50 and B75 is observed to be lower than diesel at full load, whereas for B100 it is higher at all loads. On the other hand, BSFC and NOx of MEMSO biodiesel blends are found to be higher than diesel. It is found that the combustion characteristics of all blends of methyl ester of mango seed oil showed similar trends with those of the baseline diesel. From this study, it is concluded that optimized blend is B25 and could be used as a viable alternative fuel in a single cylinder direct injection diesel engine without any modifications. (C) 2015 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).