Abstract
KEYWORDS
Biodiesel, injection equipment, injection characteristics, fuel delivery
ABSTRACT
The paper presents some experimental results concerning the use of a biodiesel type (VOME - vegetable oil methylester) fuel. The fuel was produced starting from waste cooking oil, collected from a local branch of the McDonalds’ restaurants. Cooking oils, used for frying food, have a limited life in food production due to their contamination with material from food and due to fatty acids formation. As a result, waste cooking oil can be seen as a “near to waste” by-product of food production industry. The use of waste cooking oil instead of virgin oil in order to produce biodiesel is an effective way to reduce the raw material cost and helps to solve the problem of waste oil disposal. The base catalysed method was used for producing the methyl ester. Referring to the physical properties of the fuel, we noticed that the transesterification process has significantly decreased the viscosity of the methylester is very close to the one of Diesel fuel (5.7 mm2/s, compared to 4.9 mm2/s for Diesel fuel, in comparison with 34 mm2/s - the initial viscosity of the oil). The injection equipment of a Diesel engine (in line type PES 5MW 55/320/RS 120403 BOSCH injection pump, RO-KCA30S16 injectors with RO-DNOSD21 nozzles, opening at 13 MPa) was tested. We noticed that the use of methylester led to changes of the injection characteristics (increased injection pressure, modified injection rate and average injection speed etc.).