Blending Cooking Oil Biodiesel with Petroleum Diesel: A Comparative Performance Test on a Variable IC Engine

Abstract

Research in biodiesel production has been motivated by several reasons including consistant increase in prices of pe-troleum diesel, environmental advantages, security of fuel supply, and employment creation. This paper presents a re-view of one alternative technological method that can be used to produce this fuel. Biodiesel from used cooking oil was produced by alkali catalyzed transesterification process. Performance of internal combustion engine using this bio-diesel blended with petroleum diesel in various blending ratios was performed. The engine performance studies were conducted on a variable compression engine test rig with automatic data acquisition set up. Parameters such as brake power, torque and fuel consumption were measured at different loads for pure petroleum diesel, pure biodiesel and different combinations of the dual fuel. The test results indicate that the performance of the engine is comparable for all the fuel mixtures under review.