In contrast, ethanol is produced from biogenic resources like maize, sugarcane, etc. Thus, biodiesel can be fully renewable if ethanol is used instead of methanol in the biodiesel production process.Besides, ethyl esters have extra advantages over methyl esters such that they can have better performances in cold weather. However, studies considering the characteristics of ethyl esters are limited in the literature, and these papers have fully focused on performance and emission characteristics. Any published paper investigating the spray characteristics of ethyl esters is not yet available. This paper brings a certain novelty by investigating the spray characteristics of various ethyl ester type biodiesels.

This research aimed to analyze the spray characteristics of various biodiesels, which have rarely been investigated in terms of spray analysis in the literature compared to fossil diesel. For this purpose, four different methyl ester-type biodiesels were produced from canola, corn, cottonseed, and sunflower oils. These feedstocks were selected due to their wide availability in Turkey and being among the significant resources for biodiesel production. Measured physical properties of biodiesel samples showed that biodiesel fuels had, on average, 1.7 to 1.9 times higher viscosities, 5.3 to 6.6% larger densities, and 37 to 39.1% higher contact angle values than the reference diesel fuel. Spray characteristics of all fuels were experimentally examined in a constant volume spray chamber under chamber pressures of 0, 5, 10, and 15 bar and injection pressures of 600, 800, and 1000 bar. All tested biodiesels performed, on average, 3 to 20% longer spray penetration lengths, 5 to 30% narrower spray cone angles, and 5–18% lesser spray areas than the reference diesel fuel under chamber pressures of 5 and 10 bar. No significant differences occurred at 15 bar ambient pressure between biodiesels and diesel. In addition, analytical and empirical predictions showed that biodiesels had around 21.2–35.1% larger SMD values and approximately 7% lower air entrainment.

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