Investigation of Evaporation and Combustion Characteristics of Biodiesel

Commercial adoption of renewable fuels such as biodiesels has been poor thus far due to their inherent combustion limitations. This thesis investigates the fundamental evaporation characteristics of palm biodiesel under varied environmental conditions to identify possible routes of enhancements to the overall combustion process. Higher temperatures and lower pressures were found to improve the evaporation of biodiesel droplets before ignition. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes were also found to improve evaporation significantly. At optimum evaporation conditions, biodiesel flames produced lower nitrogen oxide emissions but more carbon monoxide than diesel and gasoline surrogate fuels.