Testing of Ethanol as an Alternative Fuel for IC Engine

Abstract

Alternative fuel has become very significant and has an important role to play for both spark ignition and compression ignition engines, so the need to trim down dependency on gasoline as a fuel and its economic aspects has emerged as the reason of prime importance. Ethanol is one of the cost effective alternative fuel used to improve the performance of the engine. Various investigations carried out by the researchers, primarily focused on using alternative fuel to see the diminishing effect on the fuel consumption. The aim of the study is to analyze the performance of the engine by adding the ethanol with gasoline at certain percentages as ethanol-gasoline blend. The study is carried out in the existing SI engines by diagnosing various aspects such as air-fuel ratio, operating cylinder pressure ignition timing and compression ratio related to the performance parameters. Finally the performance of gasoline-ethanol blends (E10, E20, E25) are compared and analyzed with the gasoline. From the analysis it is noticed that the ethanol blends outperforms if the engine is modified as per the requirements.