Impact of CuO Nanoparticle Blended Waste Cooking Oil Biodiesel on the Performance and Emission Characteristics of a CI engine

Abstract

Environmental pollution and fossil fuel depletion are the major concerns in the present situation. Researchers have tried various biofuels for compression ignition (CI) engine in order to overcome these problems. Waste cooking oil (WCO) was found to be suitable alternate fuel for CI engine because of their huge availability, economically cheaper and renewable capability. However, WCO has poor fuel properties which led to inferior combustion in CI engine. Due to inferior combustion, engine performance was poor, engine exhaust emissions were higher. In this experimental work, different techniques were adopted to improve the performance of CI engine using WCO, as the base fuel. WCO was collected in bulk from a restaurant and used for the entire research work. A single cylinder, four stroke, direct injection, water cooled CI engine was used for this research work. In the first phase of work, experiments were conducted using diesel, WCO as fuel and kept as baseline data. WCO was converted into waste cooking oil biodiesel (WCOB) through transesterification process and conducted experiments using WCOB in the second phase of this work. In the third phase of the work, copper oxide nanofluids were prepared by wet chemical method in four mass concentrations, blended with WCOB and experiments were conducted. Finally, all the experimental outputs from various techniques were compared and analysed. It was observed that WCO produced lower brake thermal efficiency (BTE) and higher exhaust emissions than diesel. In the second phase, BTE was improved while using WCOB as compared to WCO. HC, CO emissions and smoke opacity were reduced. But nitric oxide (NOx) emission was found to be increased as compared to WCO. It was noted that BTE was improved further while using copper oxide nanofluids blended with WCOB. Emissions and smoke were drastically reduced as compared to WCOB and WCO.