| Summary: | Biodiesel has physiochemical properties similar to diesel fuel and it is renewable. It can be used in diesel engines with no or minor modifications. If biodiesel can be produced from renewable sources such as vegetable or other sources, the CO2 emission produced from the engine running on biodiesel can be consumed by the source itself. Then, the net production of CO2 emission in the atmosphere will be zero. However, the viscosity and density of biodiesel are higher than diesel fuel. These inferior properties make biodiesel less prone to evaporate, diffuse and mix with in-cylinder air resulting in inferior combustion and lower engine performance than diesel fuel. If the in-cylinder air-turbulence inside the combustion chamber can be increased, then this will probably enhance the higher viscous and lesser volatile biodiesel to evaporate faster and mix with air better resulting in better performance. Therefore, in this research, guide vanes were installed into the intake runner to increase the in-cylinder air turbulence especially during the injection period. Five guide vanes with the angles of 25°, 30°, 35°, 40° and 45° were fabricated and tested. The vanes were tested on a dieselgen-set and run with 100% biodiesel. Based on the experimental results, the vane angle of 35° was found to be optimum as this vane angle showed the highest reductions of break specific consumption, CO and HC by 1.77%, 8.78% and 7.5%, respectively compared to the run with biodiesel without vanes. The other vanes showed lower improvements. Therefore, this research concludes that the improvement of in-cylinder airturbulence can enhance the engine performance with higher viscous biodiesel. Copyright © 2016 by ASME.
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