Development of a biofuel lamp and its comparison with a kerosene lamp

Abstract

An attempt has been made to explore the suitability of crude Jatropha curcas seed oil (biofuel) as a fuel in substituting fully one of the important petroleum products like Kerosene. Expeller is used for the extraction of oil which is further filtered. This crude oil has a very high viscosity and, as result, cannot flow through capillary action in a standard lamp and, hence, requires viscosity reduction by a trans esterification process to convert it into biodiesel or by any other processes. But this is a complex chem-ical reaction and the cost of production becomes almost doubled unless glycerine is not recovered as a by-product. Hence, the paper describes the devel-opment of a unique lamp (lantern) fuelled by 100%biofuel (crude jatropha oil) for its illumination and its comparative performance with respect to a stan-dard kerosene lamp.