Experimental Investigation on Biodiesel from Microalgae as Fuel for Diesel Engines

Biodiesel from Algae appears as an almost ideal solution to address the problem of decreasing availability of conventional fossil fuels, as well as to reduce the impact in terms of CO2 of internal combustion engines. In comparison to other biodiesels, algae do not compete for the land use with food cultures, and they have an excellent oil yield. Despite the significant amount of technical reports about the production process of algal biodiesel, detailed information about the application to current production engines is almost completely missing. The present paper describes the experimental campaign carried out on a current production 4-cylinder, 4-stroke naturally aspirated Diesel engine, running on standard Diesel oil and on a blend made up of 20% of oil manufactured by transesterification of Microalgae (B20). Performance and emission parameters have been measured over the whole engine operating range. It was found that the use of B20 leads to a very small decrease of full load performance (lower torque and higher specific fuel consumption), in front of a significant advantage in terms of Soot emissions, partly balanced by a higher NOx rate. No apparent difference has been observed in terms of NVH when running on the two fuels.