Resource: Penn State University Combustion Lab Tour

In this interactive, Dr. Andre Boehman, a fuels science professor at the Pennsylvania State University, tours a Combustion Lab where a team is investigating renewable, advanced and clean burning fuels. They use ordinary engines to investigate how different fuels, including biodiesel, perform in ordinary engines under different road conditions. Overall, the researchers are interested in power, emissions, and performance.

Equipment in the lab includes a variety of engines from popular vehicles, as well as instruments that can measure and document the characteristics of fuels at different stages of the combustion process.

In the first movie, Dr. Boehman introduces us to a common rail turbo diesel engine like one found in a Jeep Liberty. Can an engine like this run on renewable home grown fuels, like biodiesel?

In the second movie, we see a Cummins turbo diesel engine, found in vehicles like Dodge ram pickup trucks, shuttle busses, and other kinds of personnel transport. With this engine, researchers are studying a fuel's effects on emissions.

The third engine on the tour is a small, five and a half horsepower single cylinder direct injection diesel engine. With this engine, researchers monitor the intake air flow, the composition of the exhaust, and the injection.

The fourth video explains how to test the compressibility of fuels. Researchers place a pycnometer (a capillary tube with a closed bottom) inside a high pressure cell, apply a great deal of pressure to the fuel, and see how much the volume changes.

In the fifth video, researchers are conducting two experiments to study the properties of biodiesel: viscosity and flashpoint. As the fuel is injected into the engine, viscosity determines how well the fuel is going to atomize and therefore vaporize. The flashpoint is important because in the biodiesel production process, methanol is used as a reagent, and if the methanol has not been driven out of the biodiesel in the final step of production, then the fuel will have poor ignition quality and too high a flashpoint.

The sixth video introduces an ignition quality tester to measure the ignition quality of the diesel fuel. Diesel fuels and gasolines have opposite behavior. A gasoline is meant to be compressed in an engine and burned without exploding, without going through a spontaneous ignition. But in a diesel engine, you compress the fuel and want it to spontaneously ignite.

In the seventh video, Dr. Boehman describes his strategy in researching biodiesel and other fuels. He thinks of the feed stock, production process, injection characteristics, the combustion, emissions and the ability to control the emissions, as a system that can be integrated and optimized to give minimum emissions and optimal performance.

• As we come to rely more and more on renewable resources, we may have to decide whether it's more important to use land for the production of food and the production of energy. Pick different perspectives (a farmer, a national leader, an international leader) and make your case for the right balance.
• You are a student who sees creating biodiesel fuel as the wave of the future. What discipline would you need to study at the high school level and beyond to create your own high-grade product?
• If you want to see how a fuel will perform under real world conditions, you might choose to use a dynanometer like the one in the third movie. This tool uses electromagnetic force to resist the rotation of the engine, and simulates making the engine do work, such as towing a boat up a hill, or climbing a hill at high speed. Brainstorm other real world conditions that the dynanometer could help you simulate in the lab. Is a simulation in the lab going to be enough of a test before you recommend a fuel for the marketplace?