Impact of tamanu oil-diesel blend on combustion, performance and emissions of diesel engine and its prediction methodology

Biofuels are proven for its environment friendliness, but they are not completely effective in reducing the emissions due to the problems in blending ratio, compression ratio (CR) and fuel consumption. Moreover, identifying new oil with appropriate blends of diesel is the prerequisite for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, without compromising the mechanical efficiency. Inspired from the special biofuel characteristics, this paper contributes to the literature through improving the diesel engine performance using tamanu oil (TO)-based biodiesel blend. Firstly, the TO-based biodiesel is blended with the conventional diesel to produce two blending ratios, namely 5:95 and 10:90. The blends are experimentally studied for its combustion characteristics, mechanical efficiency and the emission characteristics on a single cylinder four-stroke diesel engine. The results demonstrate the minimized emissions with no sort of compromise on the engine performance. Secondly, this paper proposes an interpolation and prediction model using artificial neural network through which the mechanical efficiency and the emission characteristics of the TO blends can be estimated. The deviation between the actual and the estimated characteristics is found to be less and so the proposed prediction model can act as an equivalent engine model for further works.