Abstract
Fuel scientific concern and research began decades ago when transesterification of a vegetable oil was conducted as early as 1853 by scientists E. Duffy and J. Patrick, many years before the first diesel engine became functional. In a 1912 speech Diesel said, "the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time." Today, in many countries throughout the world biofuels are produced, studied and implemented in all kinds of I.C. engines in order to gain different benefits from their use, such as energy independence, low pollution and costs etc. Romanian society – especially the technical part of it – was quiet sensible to the idea of renewable biofuels, and developed its particular tests in order to verify itself the possibility of implementing the idea of locally cultivate, produce and use biofuels. The paper presents the evolution and some of the results in the past decade of research, production and implementation of biofuels in Romania, especially the contribution to all this work of the Automotive Department from Technical University Cluj-Napoca.
Keywords: biofuel, biodiesel, injection system, chemical pollution, green energy.