Investigation On Thermal And Combustion Performance Of Kerosene-Biodiesel Blends And Biodiesel Extracted From Used Cooking Oil As An Alternative Fuel To Kerosene Stove

Abstract

Different kinds of waste oils in Ethiopia are usually discarded after cooking potato chips, Sambusa etc. by street food venders and hotels. The environmental pollution due to disposed of waste oil in addition to direct use of biomass and charcoal in the country threats and motivated the researchers to find alternatives energy that overcomes the pollutants. Biodiesel is under alternative energy that can be obtained from waste oil, pure oil and animal fats. It is clean and renewable energy source compared to the common alternative fuels such as biogas and ethanol. In this work, sunflower waste oil was treated into biodiesel by transesterification using methanol as a reactant and potassium hydroxide as catalyst and its physicochemical properties were determined based on American Society for Testing Materials D6751 procedure to check the grade of the extracted biodiesel. The yield which was obtained during the process was 91.86%. In addition, the energy and emission performance of wick/Butagas stove fired by pure kerosene, pure biodiesel and blend of kerosene and the biodiesel were investigated experimentally with Water Boiling Test, Controlled Cooking Test and Kitchen Performance Test protocols of cook stove. The studied considered blend of kerosene with biodiesel (percentage fraction in the range of 5 to 20). Mixture of 100 kerosene and zero percent biodiesel is termed B0 and 95% kerosene and 5% biodiesel is termed B5; the other blends are also named likewise. From the investigation, it was observed that 5% biodiesel, 10%biodiesel,15% biodiesel and 20% biodiesel can be used to fuel the wick/Butagas stove without any modification of the stove except B100. From experimental results, 5% biodiesel to 100% biodiesel results in lower emission soot and better energy performance than conventional kerosene. Among the experimental performance carried out using pure kerosene and 5% biodiesel the energy efficiency of the stove was found to be 38.7 and 39.9% for cold start, 40.0 and 41.5 for hot start and 26.4 and 28.1% for simmering tests of the water boiling test protocols. As seen from these typical results, the energy performance of pure biodiesel & kerosene blends was marginally better than pure kerosene