Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Phase stability, fuel properties, and diesel engine performance of palm-oil-based microemulsion biofuels
    (2023-05-01) ;
    Morawan, Nattaya
    ;
    ;
    Charoensaeng, Ampira
    ;
    Khaodhiar, Sutha
    Microemulsification and blending are two viscosity-modifying techniques of vegetable oils for direct use with diesel engine. In this study, alcohol blends are mixtures of ethanol, diesel, and palm-oil biodiesel while microemulsion biofuels are thermodynamically stable, clear, and single-phase mixtures of diesel, palm oil, and ethanol stabilized by surfactants and cosurfactants. Although there are many studies on biofuels lately, there is limited research on using biodiesel as a surfactant in microemulsion formulations and applied on engine performance at different engine loads. Therefore, the objectives are to investigate phase stability and fuel properties of formulated biofuels (various blends and microemulsions), to determine the engine performance at different engine loads (no load, and from 0.5 to 2.0 kW), and to estimate laboratory-scale cost of the selected biofuels compared to diesel and biodiesel. The results showed that phase stability and fuel properties of selected microemulsion biofuels are comparable to diesel and biodiesel. These microemulsion biofuels can be applied to the diesel engine at different loads while diesel-ethanol blends and palm-oil-biodiesel-ethanol blends cannot be. It was found that the energy efficiencies of the system using microemulsion biofuels were slightly lower than the average energy efficiency of diesel engine. From this study, it can be summarized that microemulsion biofuels can be formulated using palm-oil biodiesel (palm-oil methyl ester) as a bio-based surfactant and they can be considered as environmentally-friendly alternatives to diesel and biodiesel. However, cost considerations showed that the raw materials should be locally available to reduce additional costs of microemulsion biofuels.
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Formulation of microemulsion-based biofuels via the HLD framework
    (2025-01-01) ;
    Charoensaeng, Ampira
    The attention given to reverse micelle microemulsion for biofuel production has increased over the years. For Winsor Type II microemulsion systems using vegetable oil/diesel blends as an oil phase and an alkanol (i.e., ethanol) as a polar phase, surfactants with or without cosurfactants play a crucial role in the formulations. In this work, the microemulsion biofuel formulations were reviewed and discussed with regard to the formulation compositions (i.e., polar phase, oil phase, surfactant, and cosurfactant). The optimized systems in the literature were selected to calculate the HLD values. The HLD concept was investigated to predict the formulations, especially the total surfactant and cosurfactant concentration, for specific microemulsion biofuels. From the published experimental data set, correlations relating to the characteristics of the surfactant, cosurfactant, polar phase, and oil were examined. The results indicate that the HLD concept can be a useful tool to predict and provide the appropriate range of the surfactant/cosurfactant amount at the laboratory scale, which can then be developed and extended to the industrial scale in biofuel production.