ALTERNATE FUEL DEVELOPMENT FROM HIGH ACID VALUE TAMANU SEED OIL METHYL ESTER

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Ever since the world witnessed the oil crisis, there has been unprecedented stock piling of oil taking place by the developed countries. The world is confronted with the twin crisis of fossil fuel depletion and environmental degradation. The indiscriminate extraction and consumption of fossil fuel has led to the reduction of petroleum reserves. The most feasible way to meet the growing demand is by utilizing alternative fuels. This is the right time to search for liquid fuels as an alternative to diesel. Therefore it is important to explore the feasibility of substitutions of diesel with an alternative fuel, which can be produced within the country on a massive scale for commercial utilization. Alternative fuels should be easily available, environment friendly and techno economically competitive. Bio-diesel obtained from vegetable oils are being considered as a promising option. Vegetable oils, being renewable, are widely available from a variety of sources and have low sulphur contents close to zero, and hence cause less environmental damage than diesel. For this purpose, new energy crops which may not be used for edible purposes are identified. In this paper, an attempt has been made to identify a new non-edible Tamanu seed oil which can be used as bio-diesel. Being a non-edible oil category, Tamanu seed oil will not arise food versus fuel conflict. The well known Triple stage Transesterification process is used for bio-diesel preparation. The properties of Tamanu oil is tested in the laboratory and compared with diesel and other vegetable oils of its same category. The test reports says that the bio-diesel extracted from Tamanu seed oil will be one of the definite solutions for petroleum diesel. The density and viscosity of the Tamanu Oil Methyl Ester (TOME) was found to be close to the petroleum diesel oil. All the tests for characterization of bio-diesel demonstrated that almost all the important properties of bio-diesel are in very close agreement with the diesel oil making it a potential fuel for the application in compression ignition engines for complete replacement of diesel fuel.

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