Abstract

As a result of decreasing petroleum supplies, new fuel sources, such as transesterified biofeedstock based oils and their blends with petroleum diesel fuels, have emerged with potential to partially replace conventional diesel and gasoline fuels. Although these fuels have shown some promising results in engine studies, their basic combustion properties have not been well documented. Thus, there is a need for tests to characterize the combustion and emission properties of these new liquids, particularly for fuels available only in small quantities at the research and development stage. Using a technique that prevaporized the liquid fuel using heated air, the mixture was burnt. A tubular burner was used at atmospheric pressure under laminar conditions to document radiative and pollutant emissions. This newly developed technique was validated through comparison of combustion properties of fuels available in literature and later extended to test a variety of other fuels. The final experimental setup was built which used only small quantities of fuels (<50 ml) and took approximately 15 min of testing per fuel. This setup has been extended to investigate the effect of iodine number and equivalence ratio on NOx formation in laminar partially premixed flames of vaporized diesel and biofuels: canola methyl ester, soy methyl ester, and methyl stearate.

Petroleum based diesel and various biodiesel flames