Investigation of Various Biodiesel Blend Spray Characteristics in Microturbine

Abstract

Due to the depletion of the crude oil and hazardous emission issues, biodiesel is the most suitable alternative fuel to replace fossil fuel. Application of biodiesel in power generation is still in the early stage and most of the research are focused on the transportation usage. This research aims to study the biodiesel fuel spray characteristic to gauge the technical feasibility of using biodiesel in a microturbine. Moreover, performance and emission characteristics of compression ignition engines depend strongly on inner nozzle and spray behavior. The same concept will be used for this research whereby it will be applied for power generation. Among the numerous alternative fuels, biodiesel can achieve high   combustion   efficiency   and   less   emission   because biodiesel has higher oxygen content and this completes the combustion process.   Moreover, chemical fuel properties of biodiesel will affect the spray structure such as spray pattern, spary length, spray angle and sauter mean diameter (SMD). Composition of the chemical fuel properties depends on the blending ratio of diesel and biodiesel blend content,  which produces different amount of density, viscosity and surface tension.  Modelling of the atomizer  will be presented using Computational Fluids Dynamics tools to present the analysis of SMD and spray pattern. Comparison  will be made with respect to the experimental results carried out in the atomizer test rig. It can be said that the higher content of biodiesel gives a larger droplet size and longer spray length. However it produce smaller spray angle and spray width but with clearer vortex shape of spray pattern