Abstract

Vegetable oils are renewable in nature and can be directly used as fuels in diesel engines.  However, their high viscosity and poor volatility lead to reduced thermal efficiency and increased hydrocarbon, carbon monoxide and smoke emissions. Transesterification is one of the methods by which viscosity could be drastically reduced and the fuel could be adopted for use in diesel engine.  This Esterified vegetable oil is popularly known as Bio-diesel and that is commercially available in the developed countries due to its distinct advantage over the conventional diesel. In this work, neat cotton seed oil was converted into  Bio diesel  by  the   transesterification  process  and  the  viscosity  was  reduced from 21.4 ×10^-6 m²/s to 4.8×10^-6 m²/s (viscosity of the neat Cotton seed oil). A single cylinder water-cooled, direct injection diesel engine developing a power output of 3.7 kW at 1500 rpm was used for the experimental investigations which include combustion, performance and emission characteristics of the engine. Base data was generated for diesel first and subsequently, it was replaced by the Bio diesel and both the results were compared and discussed.

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