A cleaner and greener fuel: Biofuel blend formulation and emission assessment

Biofuel is an attractive vehicular fuel option for the transportation sector. Diverse biofuel blends can be produced from biomass. Complexity arises when optimum biofuel blends need to be designed to comply with fuel regulation standards as well as generate less emission. This paper discusses an integrated computational and experimental technique to design economically viable and environmentally friendly tailor-made biofuel blends from palm biomass that is abundant in Malaysia. An experimental based trial-and-error method is time consuming and uses up resources. Computational approaches adopt a systematic blend formulation methodology that assists focused experimental work. The biofuel design problem has been formulated as a Non-Linear Program to satisfy specified target properties such as density, kinematic viscosity, cetane number, gross calorific value, distillation temperature, and sulphur content. Target properties predicted through mixture property models were experimentally validated according to ASTM standard test methods. Five optimum tailor-made biofuel blend formulations were generated based on cost, gross calorific value and emission limitations. The result indicates that biofuel blends with butyl levulinate could increase the price of biofuel up to 80% from the retail price of B5 diesel. However, cleaner biofuel with less cost and highest calorific value can be achieved for biofuel blends that contain B5 diesel, butanol and ethanol. The application of this model yields about 26% CO2 emission reduction and about 22% less sulphur content as well as comply with the EN590 fuel regulation standard.