Abstract—Significant efforts have been made to reduce the pollution caused by Direct Injection (DI) diesel engines during the past decades. One of the promising engineering solutions is the use of gaseous fuels as a supplement for liquid diesel fuel. These engines, which use conventional diesel fuel and gaseous fuel, are referred to as dual fuel engines. The main objective of the dual fuel combustion systems is to reduce particulate emissions and nitrogen oxides. One of the gaseous fuels used is natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel, economical and possesses a relatively high auto ignition temperature. The high auto ignition temperature of natural gas is a serious advantage against other gaseous fuels since the compression ratio of most conventional DI diesel engines can be maintained. Furthermore, the combustion of natural gas produces practically no particulates since natural gas contains less dissolved impurities (e.g., sulfur compounds). The current study investigates the tribological performance of dual fuel diesel engine used oil. A set of used oil samples was taken from the dual fuel diesel engine after 25 hrs, 50 hrs and 100 hrs of operation at full load. A standard ball on disc friction-wear testing machine was used to study the impact of the above mentioned used oils on the friction and wear of various engine components. The results showed that the dual fuel engine used oil showed a much better behavior than the traditional diesel engine used oil in terms of friction and wear behavior for the four different levels of operating times. The difference was more significant at the longer operation time. This can be attributed to the fact that the dual fuel engine is a cleaner engine; hence it produces lower soot content than the diesel fuel engine.

Index Terms—Friction, Wear, Dual fuel engine, Oil.

Cite: Saud Aldajah and Mohamed Y E Selim, "Tribological Behavior of Dual Fuel Diesel Engine," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 41-50, April 2013.