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The past literature on the use of vegetable oils as fuel in diesel engine revealed that utilizing vegetable oil fuels in diesel engines may require property changes in the oil or perhaps, some minor engine modifications or operating changes. This study was conducted to search for the effect of atmospheric oxygen on the puffing and bursting phenomena that occur during vegetable oils droplet vaporization process in their use as fuel in diesel engine. The fiber-suspended droplet technique was used, and the normalized square droplet diameter as well as the temperature evolution vicinity the droplet was analyzed. The results show that puffing and bursting phenomena highly depend on oxygen. In presence of atmospheric oxygen, there is an increase of the puffing and bursting intensity and therefore the evaporation rate of the vegetable oil droplets, but in an inert environment or when the environment is oxygen-depleted puffing and bursting phenomena disappearing and make place of a series of explosions with lower magnitude. The lack of oxygen reduces the thermal degradation, polymerization and oxidation reactions and consequently the vaporization rate of vegetable oils droplets; and could therefore lead to the formation of deposits in the form of polymers. This is unsuitable for their use as a fuel in diesel engines. It can also be concluded that atmospheric oxygen has some positive effects on engine performance and emissions when operating with vegetable oil. These results help to address the challenge for the use of alternative fuels such as non-edible vegetable oils.

This work gives tools to overcome the difficulty to determine experimentally physical properties for vegetable oils within the range of temperature typically observed during the injection phase in a diesel engine. Knowing vegetable oils' physical properties to these ranges of temperature is of fundamental importance when modeling their combustion in diesel engine. However, vegetable oils' experimental physical properties data are rare in the literature for temperature above 523 K. This paper describes experimental measurements and estimation methods for density, dynamic viscosity, thermal conductivity and heat capacity of vegetable oils for this particular range of temperature. The methodology uses several correlative methods using group contribution approach for each property and compares experimental data with predicted one to select the more accurate model. This work has shown the rapeseed and jatropha oils' physical properties can be satisfactorily predicted as a function of temperature using group contribution approach.