Optical study on the spray and combustion characteristics of diesel-biodiesel-alcohol blend fuels on a constant volume combustion chamber

The rapid increase in automobile ownership has brought about an increase in pollutant emissions, the blending of alcohols can effectively reduce conventional pollutant emissions from diesel engines. However, alcohols have poor inter-solubility with diesel fuel. This study investigates the effects of blending different alcohols on the spray and combustion characteristics of diesel, with biodiesel as the cosolvent. The results show that among the three alcohols, blending methanol has the best improvement in the gas-liquid phase spray characteristics, followed by ethanol and propanol. The GL-SCA and GL-SPA of the methanol blends are 8.2 % and 2.3 % larger than those of the ethanol blends, and 19 % and 11.9 % larger than those of the propanol blends, respectively. Among the four fuels, fuel blended with methanol emits the least normalized sum KL, 45 % less than that of diesel, 23.8 % less than that of ethanol blended fuel, and 35.3 % less than that of propanol blended fuel.