INVESTIGATION OF THE CETANE RESPONSE OF DIESEL BLENDED WITH BUTANOL
Open Access
- Author:
- Kane, Drew William
- Area of Honors:
- Elective Area of Honors - Energy and Mineral Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Andre Louis Boehman, Thesis Supervisor
Andre Louis Boehman, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Yaw Yeboah, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- IQT
cetane
butanol
diesel
combustion - Abstract:
- Research into butanol as a possible fuel source has grown rapidly over the past couple of years. There is much excitement surrounding this possible new fuel due to several key benefits it holds over ethanol. However, butanol is still relatively unstudied as a standalone fuel or an additive. This paper looks at the effects butanol has on the cetane number of diesel fuels. The four different isomers of butanol were blended with a stock diesel in concentrations up to 40% by volume. The fuel blends were then run through an Ignition Quality Tester (IQT™) to determine their Derived Cetane Number (DCN). The miscibility of the isomers of butanol with diesel was also studied. The results show that all the isomers do depress the cetane number. However, not all the isomers performed the same. 1-Butanol and 2-butanol both performed very similarly, depressing the DCN 3-4 points at a 10% concentration, and depressing it a full 15 points at a 40% concentration. Iso-butanol, which performed the worst, reduced the DCN over 4 points at 10% concentration and nearly 18 points at the highest concentration. Somewhat surprisingly, tert-butanol performed the best. At the 10% concentration, the DCN was depressed less than 2 points, and at the 40% level, it was only depressed by 9 points. Furthermore, all of the butanol isomers were determined to be fully miscible in diesel up to at least a 40% concentration by volume.