Determination of the Proportion of Blend of Biodiesel with Diesel for Optimal Engine Performance and Emission Characteristics

Biodiesels, produced from natural and renewable sources such as vegetable oils are most likely to replace petroleum derived diesel as a CI engine fuel in the long term. However it may be intended to use Biodiesels as blends with diesel in standard proportions. This work makes a thorough analysis of the variation of performance and emission characteristics of CI engine with respect to the proportion of Biodiesel in the blend and also attempts to find the optimal blend depending upon properties of the Biodiesel using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).There may exist a particular value of the proportion for every Biodiesel for which the best performance and/or lowest emissions are obtained.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are used for this correlation between percentage of Biodiesel in the blend with performance and emissions. Fuel properties are used as an input to generalize the solution so that the same network can be used for different bio-esters.

The optimized network predicts Specific Fuel Consumption and the emissions of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons based on the percentage of blend of a given Biodiesel.