Author : Hanchate Suresh Babu Rao, B. Venkatesh, Dr. T. Venkateswara Rao, Dr. K. Hema Chandra Reddy

The world is confronted with serious problems like fossil fuel depletion and environmental degradation. Fossil fuels in near future will become rare due to its indiscriminate extraction and consumption. Therefore, biodiesel is considered as a promising option as they are clean renewable fuels and best substitute for diesel fuel in any compression ignition engine. The important advantages of using biodiesel are its renewability and better quality of exhaust gas emissions. In this research, biodiesel was synthesized from peanut seed oil via base catalyzed transesterification using NaOH as the catalyst. The synthesized fatty acid methyl ester after being washed was blended with diesel in the following percentage by volume of the biodiesel 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% corresponding to B0, B20, B40, B60, B80 and B100 respectively. Thus the prepared biodiesel blends and tested on a diesel engine. The properties of fuel are found such as viscosity, flash point, fire point and calorific value. Also, the investigation of engine performances on diesel like brake power, brake specific fuel consumption, brake thermal efficiency, indicated thermal efficiency and exhaust gas temperature of various blends of peanut seed oil was carried out and their comparison made. Finally, a discussion on emissions is also given in this paper.

Keywords: biodiesel, peanut oil, transesterification, engine performance, emission.

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.3,No.4(Oct- 2013)