PERFORMANCE AND EMISSION ANALYSIS OF CI ENGINES FUELED WITH BIODIESEL BLENDS USING TAGUCHI GREY RELATIONAL ANALYSIS (

Diesel engines are widely used in many areas like automobiles, locomotive marine engines power generations etc., due to its high power output and thermal efficiency. Even though the diesel engines give more benefits, the human discomforts caused by the pollutant emission of these engines have to be considered. The major pollutant emissions of the diesel engines are particulate matters, smoke, CO, CO2, HC, PM and the oxides of nitrogen (NOx). Out of these pollutant emissions, the oxides of nitrogen are considered as the most harmful pollutants to the human health. Taguchi method was used to prepare the design of experiment for optimization of a CI engine for blends of Jatropha biodiesel as a fuel. The results obtained with blends of Jatropha biodiesel were compared with diesel. CI engine input parameters are optimized as follows: 10% fuel fraction, 18 compression ratio, 220 bar injection pressure and 4 hole nozzle geometry with four levels of each parameter by using Taguchi’s L16 orthogonal array to reduce the number sets of experiments. The rank of each parameter is calculated on the basis of influence on output variables. The optimized conditions obtained from theoretical and experimental results are validated. Keywords: CI Engine, Taguchi, GRA Techniques, Optimization, Performance, Emission, Vibration.