Performance and Emission Characteristics of a Biogas Fueled DI Diesel Engine

The awareness on the use of biofuels is increasing day by day among the public throughout the world, because of their merits over petroleum fuels. Biogas is a clean, cheaper and eco-friendly fuel. It can be produced from any organic digestive material. In the present research work, biogas was produced by anaerobic digestion of de-oiled cakes obtained from an oil crushing unit. Further, the biogas was used as an alternative fuel in a direct injection (DI) diesel engine on dual fuel mode. Diesel was used as a pilot fuel while, biogas was inducted at different flow rates of 0.15kg/h, 0.3kg/h, 0.45kg/h and 0.6kg/h along with the inducted air through the intake manifold. The performance and the emission characteristics of the engine were studied. The dual fuel mode operation showed a higher BSEC than that of single fuel mode. Also, 30% diesel consumption was replaced by biogas in dual fuel mode. The dual fuel mode emission showed 16% and 21% increment in the CO and HC emissions. The NO and smoke emissions were found to be lower by about 35% and 41.3%. The results of the experiments were compared with the diesel operation and presented in this paper.