Determination of Performance of a Semi-Adiabatic Diesel Engine with Plastic Oil

In the context of fast depletion of fossil fuels, ever increase of pollution levels with fossil fuels, increase of economic burden due to import of crude petroleum with foreign exchange, the search for alternative fuels has become pertinent. Vegetable oils and alcohols are important substitutes for diesel fuel, as they are renewable nature. However, alcohols have low Cetane (measure of combustion quality) number, while vegetable oils have high viscosity and low volatility causing combustion problems in diesel engine. Trials were conducted to improve thermal efficiency with supercharging fuelled with plastic oil. Though plastic oil has calorific value on par with diesel fuel, plastic oil has high viscosity, it may cause combustion problems associated with injection problems. Hence this calls for semi adiabatic diesel engine, consisting of air gap insulated piston with stainless steel crown and stainless steel gasket. The crown was threaded to body of the piston by means of threading keeping the gasket in between the body and crown of the piston. Performance parameters of brake thermal efficiency, exhaust gas temperature, volumetric efficiency were determined at different values of brake mean effective pressure of the engine. Brake specific energy consumption was evaluated at full load of the engine. Performance parameters were evaluated with varied injection timing and at constant injection pressure. The injection timing was varied with electronic sensor. SADE with supercharging improved the performance in comparison with CE without supercharging. Injection timing further reduced pollutants.