Abstract
An experimental investigation was conducted to analyze the effects of biodiesel-ethanol and biodiesel-diesel blended fuels on the characteristics of combustion and exhaust emissions, and size distributions of particulate matter in a single cylinder diesel engine. The three types of test fuel were biodiesel and two blended fuels which were added ethanol and diesel by 20 % volume based fraction into biodiesel, respectively. In this study, the injection rate, combustion pressure, exhaust emissions and size distributions of particulate matter were measured under various injection timings and injection pressures. The experimental results show that biodiesel-ethanol blended fuel has lengthened ignition delay and low combustion pressure in comparison with those of biodiesel and biodiesel-diesel blended fuel even if all fuels indicated similar trends of injection rate under equal injection pressures. In addition, the ethanol blended fuel significantly reduced nitrogen oxidies (NOx) and soot emissions. And then the size distribution of particulate matters shows that blended fuels restrain the formation of particles which were beyond the range of 150nm comparison with biodiesel fuel.
