Investigation on the Effect of 5% Biodiesel -Diesel Blend on Heavy Duty Buses: With Different Aspiration Technologies in Respect of Vehicle Performance

Biodiesel derived from non-edible vegetable oils/tree borne oils hold potential for meeting India's future energy needs by part substitution of Diesel Fuel. This paper investigates performance of 5% blend of commercially available biodiesel (B5) in diesel as fuel for heavy duty vehicles. The test fuel was evaluated on buses with different aspiration technologies viz. naturally aspirated and turbo charged, and the same was compared with neat commercial diesel under different operating conditions like driving cycle, road load simulation (RLS) and wide open throttle (WOT) on chassis dynamometer for power, fuel economy, smoke and soot particle number concentration. Fuel economy was observed to be comparable with B5 in naturally aspirated bus while better fuel economy was observed in case of Turbo charged bus with B5. However, there was a marginal drop in the WOT power (vehicle) with B5 fuel in naturally aspirated bus while the drop was higher with Turbo charged bus. In general the particle number concentration with naturally aspirated bus was higher than turbo charged bus.