Bio-kerosene from palm based fuel: Combustion performance in the radial swirling flow combustor.

Bio-kerosene combustion implicates harmful effect to the environment because of the emissions produced. The release of gaseous emissions such as oxides of nitrogen (NOX), and carbon monoxide (CO) into the atmosphere creates major environmental problems. These gaseous emissions affect plants, human being and animals. High concentration of emissions brings fatal effects to life form. This research aims to evaluate the combustion performance using Bio-kerosene blends in high swirling flow. A Bio-kerosene fuel burner system with different flat vane radial air swirler with 280 mm inside diameter combustor of 1000 mm length has been investigated. All tests were conducted using various Bio-kerosene blends (commercial diesel-palm oil with ratio of B5-B20) as fuel. A radial flow air swirler with curve blades having 75 mm outlet diameter was inserted at the inlet plane of the combustor to produce swirling flow. Fuel was injected at the back plate of the swirler outlet using central fuel injector with single fuel nozzle pointing axially outwards. The swirler vane angles and equivalence ratios were varied. Tests were carried out using two different air swirlers having swirl number of 0.978 and 1.427 vane angles. The results show that NOX emissions were reduce about 5% at all blends of Bio-kerosene at swirl number 1.427 compared to swirl number 0.978. CO emissions were also reduced by 10% at all blends of Bio-kerosene at swirl number 1.427 compared to swirl number 0.978 at same equivalence ratio respectively. Further investigation could be done using higher blending of Bio-kerosene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]