Shock Tube Combustion Analysis

The shock tube is a metal tube that the gas at low pressure and high pressure are separated by a diaphragm. When the diaphragm (make of material copper and aluminum) breaks on predetermined conditions (high pressure in this case) produces shock waves that move from the high-pressure chamber (known the compression chamber or Driver section) for low pressure chamber (known the expansion chamber or Driven section). The objective of this work is the correlate the ignition delay times of convectional Diesel and Biodiesel from soybean oil measured in a shock tube. The results were correlated with the cetane number of respective fuels and compared with the ignition delay times of Diesel and Biodiesel with cetane numbers of known. The ignition delay time of biodiesel from soybean oil was approximately three times greater than the ignition delay time of convectional Diesel. The contribution of this work is that it shows why pure biodiesel should not be used as substitutes for Diesel compression ignition engines without any major changes in the engines.