Performance evaluation of a diesel engine fueled with methyl ester of castor seed oil

Diesel engines are widely used as power sources in medium and heavy-duty applications because of their lower fuel consumption and lower emissions of carbon monoxide (CO) and unburned hydrocarbons (HC) compared with gasoline engines. Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, ran an engine on groundnut oil at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Since then, vegetable oils have been used as fuels when petroleum supplies were expensive or difficult to obtain. With the increased availability of petroleum in the 1940s, research into vegetable oils decreased. Since the oil crisis of the 1970s research interest has expanded in the area of alternative fuels. The difficulties associated with using raw vegetable oils in diesel engines identified in the literature are injector coking, severe engine deposits, filter gumming problems, piston ring sticking, and injector coking and thickening of the lubricating oil. The high viscosity and low volatility of raw vegetable oils are generally considered to be the major drawbacks for their utilization as fuels in diesel engines. Castor methyl ester (CME) blends showed performance characteristics close to diesel. Therefore castor methyl ester blends can be used in CI engines in rural area for meeting energy requirement in various agricultural operations such as irrigation, threshing, indistries etc.