Author : S.Sunil Kumar Reddy and V. Pandurangadu

The continuing rise in prices, growing concern on environment from exhaust emissions, global warming and threat of supply instabilities have led for alternative fuel for diesel engines. The alcohols are considered to be as a favorable substitute as they are indigenously developed and are renewable. But due to the alcohols low cetane number, high self ignition temperature, high latent heat, low viscosity, it is difficult to start the diesel engine at the available combustion chamber temperatures. So in the present work an insulated engine (IE) is developed by insulating the engine components that retains higher temperatures in the combustion chamber and further condenses the ignition delay and improves the efficiency. But the main shortcoming of alcohol is its lower viscosity, which makes the fuel injection pump to inject additional quantity of fuel into the combustion chamber. This reduces the temperature of the chamber and thus the beginning of the engine is difficult. So in the present work an attempt is made to find the suitable fuel injection pressure at which the performance of alcohol is near to diesel fuel. Further the performance parameters of the engine are studied with five injector opening pressures (180, 175, 170, 165 and 160 bar). From the experimental results, it is observed that at 165 bar fuel injector pressure the performance results best and is in close agreement with diesel fuel.

Keywords: Insulated engine, injection pressures, ceramics and emissions

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