Alternate Hydro Energy Centre

Environmental concerns and energy crisis of the world has led to the search of viable alternatives to conventional sources of fuel. FAME (Fatty Acid Methyl Ester) is environment friendly, alternative, and nontoxic, safe, biodegradable has a high flash point and is also termed as Bio-Diesel. It is commonly produced by the process transesterification. For its production, establishment of suitable process, selection of proper feedstock and reaction parameters is of utmost importance in present scenario. This paper is an attempt to investigate diesel engine performance with cotton seed biodiesel. A higher BTE was found with the preheated with B20, B40 and B60 that 3.74%, 10.46%, 3.27% at full load more than that for diesel. Smoke was reduced with considerable factor when quantity of biodiesel is increased in pure diesel.

Extensive use of fossil fuel resources especially petroleum has resulted in situation to look for alternative fuel sources. Biodiesel offers a good choice due to its renewable nature. In recent times, mainly methanol has been used in transesterification reaction for biodiesel production as it is derived from fossil sources, and biodiesel produced cannot be termed as completely renewable while other alcohols such as ethanol, being obtained from renewable sources such as potatoes, sugarcane, grains, corn and sorghum can be used for transesterification reaction. The aim of this work was to investigate the impact of ethanol on bio-diesel production from Karanja oil and then optimise process variables for transesterification process. Further a comparison was done in optimised reaction parameters for methanolysis and ethanolysis. The result of experimental investigation shows that Karanja biodiesel yield of 91.05% was achieved with molar ratio of 10.44:1 for methanol using 1.22% w/w KOH as catalyst for 90.78 min at the temperature of 66.8 °C. On the other hand for, ethanolysis, optimised reaction conditions were, 8.42:1 molar ratio, 61.3 °C reaction temperature with 1.21% of catalyst and 120 min of reaction time to obtain yield of 77.4%.

Rapid industrialisation and excessive use of fossil fuel resources has led to growing concern for development of next generation fuel sources. So, the exaggerated to be fulfilled and to curb the problem of increasing fuel prices; researchers are putting their efforts to produce an alternative fuel from replenish-able resources on large scale. Biodiesel is one of the promising biofuels as a replacement to petroleum diesel in future. Transesterification is most adopted technique to produce biodiesel and generally methanol is used as reactant in transesterification. Biodiesel produced by using methanol as alcohols cannot be termed as completely renewable as methanol is derived from fossil resources. To make it completely renewable, alcohol derived from bio-based resources should be adopted. In this paper, an attempt has been made to make use of higher alcohol propanol, butanol and pentanol is used for biodiesel production process and reaction parameter catalyst, time, temperature, molar ratio are optimised with application of Response Surface Methodology (RSM) by using Design Expert software. The result of experimental investigation shows that optimised biodiesel yield was obtained maximum for 1-butanol (76.4%), for 1-pentanol (73.13%) and minimum for 2-propanol (56.86%). The comparative analysis of biodiesel obtained from different alcohols shows that all the resultant biodiesel properties meets the Indian Standard 15607 standard, while the result also indicates that Karanja Oil Pentyl Ester (KOPnE) had superior cold flow properties with viscosity marginally higher among all biodiesels.

Due to fluctuation in fuel prices in recent times the Indian economy is facing a heavy burden on the economic front to meet the energy supply demand. Due to large gap between the supply and demand of petroleum products. The government of India in its National Biofuel Policy is moving towards the development of biofuel as alternative source of energy by increasing its blends to 20 % by year 2017. In this path of development Karanja oil is being identified as second most important source of biodiesel production in India after Jatropha. But the poor stability and cold flow property associated with the Karanja biodiesel make it difficult for using it as alternative fuel to diesel. The storage of biodiesel is the major issue area for its long term utilization. The aim of present investigation is to optimize the storage period of Karanja biodiesel using various metals and antioxidants for a period of 6 months. The optimum result for OS of KB with same time and same amount of antioxidant for iron (Fe), aluminium (Al) and zinc (Zn) are 8.34, 8.40 and 8.20 h respectively with metal concentration level of 1.10, 0.85 and 1.45 ppm.