Performance and emission characteristics of variable compression ratio CI engine fueled with dual biodiesel blends of Rapeseed and Mahua

This paper demonstrates the performance and emission characteristics of a variable compression ratio diesel engine (VCRDE) with the dual biodiesel. The dual biodiesel used is a blend of Rapeseed (RA) and Mahua biodiesel (MU) in equal proportion by volume. The experiment is conducted under different load conditions with constant engine speed of 1500 rpm. The biodiesels used here are prepared by transesterification process and formed one new biodiesel (RM) with mixing of Rapeseed biodiesel and Mahua biodiesel by equal volume (1:1). The performance test is done for 100% RA, 100% MU and different RM blends such as BL20, BL40, BL60 and BL80, along with diesel. The obtained results have shown that, the blend BL20 gave the best performance and is closest to diesel fuel. Further, based on the experimental results the brake thermal efficiency of the blend BL20 was found to be 2.79% lesser than diesel fuel. Also, the emission characteristics of BL20 such as CO, HC and smoke at full load conditions were 20.66%, 8.56% and 6.9% lesser than diesel respectively. On the other hand, the NOx emission was obtained slightly higher than the diesel fuel by 3.77%.The outcomes of this paper corroborate that, without any modification in engine, the blend BL20 can be used as an alternate fuel for the diesel.