Abstract

Biodiesel-compressed natural gas (CNG) dual fuel combustion (DFC) system is studied for the
simultaneous reduction of particulate matters (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel engine. In
this study, biodiesel is used as a pilot injection fuel to ignite the main fuel, CNG of DFC system. In
particular, the pilot injection pressure is controlled to investigate the characteristics of engine
performance and exhaust emissions in a single cylinder diesel engine. The results show that the
indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) of biodiesel-CNG DFC mode is lower than that of diesel
single fuel combustion (SFC) mode at higher injection pressure. However, the combustion stability of
biodiesel-CNG DFC mode is increased with the increase of pilot injection pressure. At the same
injection pressure, the start of combustion of biodiesel-CNG DFC is delayed compared to diesel SFC
due to the increase of ignition delay of pilot fuel. On the contrary, it is observed that as the pilot
injection pressure increase, the combustion process begins and ends a little earlier for biodieselCNG DFC. The ignition delay in the DFC is about 1.2-2.6CA longer compared to diesel SFC, but
decreases with increases of pilot injection pressure. Smoke and NOx emissions are decreased and
increased, respectively, as the pilot injection pressure increases in the biodiesel-CNG DFC. In
comparison to diesel SFC, smoke emissions are significantly reduced over all the operating
conditions and NOx emissions also exhibited similar reduction trend except for the full load condition
in biodiesel-CNG DFC. DFC yields higher CO emissions compared to diesel SFC over all engine
conditions except for 100% load. The more unburned hydrocarbon emissions are exhausted in the
DFC mode than in the diesel SFC; however, this decreases with increases in pilot injection pressure.