Experimental study on the evaluation of alternative ethanol rates’ effects on fuel consumption of engines using diesel-ethanol dual fuel

Abstract

The research, development and application of alternative fuels are the common trend
in many countries around the world, in order to reduce the dependence on fossil
fuels, securing energy security as well as reducing environmental impact, particularly
greenhouse gases. In particular, ethanol is considered as one of the potential fuels for
diesel engines. There have been many international and domestic projects
experimenting and evaluating effects of LPG and CNG rates to fuel consumption of
diesel engines using diesel-LPG and diesel-CNG. However, there has been no
experimental publication evaluating the effect of alternative ethanol rates to the fuel
consumption of diesel engines using diesel-ethanol dual fuel, which has different
physical and chemical characteristics from the aforementioned fuels. This paper
presents an experimental study on evaluating the effects of alternative ethanol rates
on the fuel consumption of diesel engines using diesel-ethanol dual fuel.
Experimental results showed that the equivalent diesel consumption decreases with
increasing load and vice versa when compared with non-ethanol.