In this article we delved into diesel fuel, the meaning, origin, different names, types, storage method and the uses of diesel fuel.
Diesel fuel is the common term for the distillate fuel oil sold for use in motor vehicles that use the compression ignition engine named for its inventor, German engineer Rudolf Diesel.
It also called diesel oil or historically heavy oil, is any liquid fuel specifically designed for use in a diesel engine, a type of internal combustion engine in which fuel ignition takes place without a spark as a result of compression of the inlet air and then injection of fuel. Therefore, diesel fuel needs good compression ignition characteristics.
The most common type is a specific fractional distillate of petroleum fuel oil, but alternatives that are not derived from petroleum, such as biodiesel, biomass to liquid (BTL) or gas to liquid (GTL) diesel are increasingly being developed and adopted. To distinguish these types, petroleum-derived diesel is sometimes called Petro diesel in some academic circles. Petro diesel is a high-volume profitable product produced in crude oil refineries.
ORIGIN
Diesel fuel originated from experiments conducted by German scientist and inventor Rudolf Diesel for his compression-ignition engine which he invented around 1892. At first, Diesel tested crude oil from Pechelbronn, but soon replaced it with petrol and kerosene, because crude oil proved to be too viscous with the main testing fuel for the Diesel engine being kerosene (paraffin). Diesel experimented with types of lamp oil from various sources, as well as types of petrol and ligroin, which all worked well as Diesel engine fuels. Later, Diesel tested coal tar creosote, paraffin oil, crude oil, gasoline and fuel oil, which eventually worked as well. In Scotland and France, shale oil was used as fuel for the first 1898 production Diesel engines because other fuels were too expensive.
During his first Diesel engine tests, Diesel also used illuminating gas as fuel, and managed to build functional designs, both with and without pilot injection. This engine proved to be functional, but suffered from piston ring failure after a few minutes due to coal dust deposition.
Before diesel fuel was standardized, diesel engines typically ran on cheap fuel oils. The introduction of motor-vehicle diesel engines, such as the Mercedes-Benz OM 138, in the 1930s meant that higher-quality fuels with proper ignition characteristics were needed. At first no improvements were made to motor-vehicle diesel fuel quality. After World War II, the first modern high-quality diesel fuels were standardized.
DIFFERENT NAMES OF DIESEL
Diesel fuel has many colloquial names; most commonly, it is simply referred to as diesel. In the United Kingdom, diesel fuel for road use is commonly called diesel or sometimes white diesel if required to differentiate it from a reduced-tax agricultural-only product containing an identifying-colored dye known as red diesel. The official term for white diesel is DERV, standing for diesel-engine road vehicle. In Australia, diesel fuel is also known as distillate (not to be confused with “distillate” in an older sense referring to a different motor fuel), and in Indonesia (as well in Israel), it is known as Solar, a trademarked name from the country’s national petroleum company PERTAMINA. The term gas oil (French: gazole) is sometimes also used to refer to diesel fuel.
TYPES
Diesel fuel is produced from various sources, the most common being petroleum. Other sources include biomass, animal fat, biogas, natural gas, and coal liquefaction.
Petroleum diesel
Petroleum diesel, also called Petro diesel, fossil diesel, or mineral diesel, is the most common type of diesel fuel. It is produced from the fractional distillation of crude oil between 200 and 350 °C (392 and 662 °F) at atmospheric pressure, resulting in a mixture of carbon chains that typically contain between 9 and 25 carbon atoms per molecule.
Synthetic diesel
Synthetic diesel can be produced from any carbonaceous material, including biomass, biogas, natural gas, coal and many others. The raw material is gasified into synthesis gas, which after purification is converted by the Fischer–Tropsch process to a synthetic diesel.
The process is typically referred to as biomass-to-liquid (BTL), gas-to-liquid (GTL) or coal-to-liquid (CTL), depending on the raw material used.
Biodiesel
Biodiesel is obtained from vegetable oil or animal fats (biolipids) which are mainly fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), and trans esterified with methanol. It can be produced from many types of oils, the most common being rapeseed oil (rapeseed methyl ester, RME) in Europe and soybean oil (soy methyl ester, SME) in the US. Methanol can also be replaced with ethanol for the transesterification process, which results in the production of ethyl esters. The transesterification processes use catalysts, such as sodium or potassium hydroxide, to convert vegetable oil and methanol into biodiesel and the undesirable byproducts glycerin and water, which will need to be removed from the fuel along with methanol traces. Biodiesel can be used pure (B100) in engines where the manufacturer approves such use, but it is more often used as a mix with diesel, BXX where XX is the biodiesel content in percent.
READ: Trading & Marketing Permit for Petroleum Products
Fuel Injection Equipment (FIE) manufacturers have raised several concerns regarding biodiesel, identifying FAME as being the cause of the following problems: corrosion of fuel injection components, low-pressure fuel system blockage, increased dilution and polymerization of engine sump oil, pump seizures due to high fuel viscosity at low temperature, increased injection pressure, elastomeric seal failures and fuel injector spray blockage. Pure biodiesel has an energy content about 5–10% lower than petroleum diesel. The loss in power when using pure biodiesel is 5–7%.
As biodiesel contains low levels of sulfur, the emissions of sulfur oxides and sulfates, major components of acid rain, are low. Use of biodiesel also results in reductions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter.
Hydrogenated oils and fats
This category of diesel fuels involves converting the triglycerides in vegetable oil and animal fats into alkanes by refining and hydrogenation, such as Neste Renewable Diesel or H-Bio. The produced fuel has many properties that are similar to synthetic diesel, and are free from the many disadvantages of FAME.
DME
Dimethyl ether, DME, is a synthetic, gaseous diesel fuel that results in clean combustion with very little soot and reduced NOx emissions.
STORAGE
In the US, diesel is recommended to be stored in a yellow container to differentiate it from kerosene, which is typically kept in blue containers, and gasoline (petrol), which is typically kept in red containers. In the UK, diesel is normally stored in a black container to differentiate it from unleaded or leaded petrol, which are stored in green and red containers, respectively.
USES
Diesel fuel is mostly used in high-speed diesel engines, especially motor-vehicle (e.g. car, lorry) diesel engines, but not all diesel engines run on diesel fuel. For example, large two-stroke watercraft engines typically use heavy fuel oils instead of diesel, and certain types of diesel engines, such as MAN M-System engines, are designed to run on petrol with knock resistances of up to 86 RON. On the other hand, gas turbine and some other types of internal combustion engines, and external combustion engines, can also be designed to take diesel fuel.
On-road vehicles
Trucks and buses, which were often otto-powered in the 1920s through 1950s, are now almost exclusively diesel-powered. Due to its ignition characteristics, diesel fuel is thus widely used in these vehicles. Since diesel fuel is not well-suited for otto engines, passenger cars, which often use otto or otto-derived engines, typically run on petrol instead of diesel fuel. However, especially in Europe and India, many passenger cars have, due to better engine efficiency, diesel engines, and thus run on regular diesel fuel.
Railroad
Diesel displaced coal and fuel oil for steam-powered vehicles in the latter half of the 20th century, and is now used almost exclusively for the combustion engines of self-powered rail vehicles (locomotives and railcars).
Aircraft
In general, diesel engines are not well-suited for planes and helicopters. This is because of the diesel engine’s comparatively low power-to-mass ratio, meaning that diesel engines are typically rather heavy, which is a disadvantage in aircraft. Therefore, there is little need for using diesel fuel in aircraft, and diesel fuel is not commercially used as aviation fuel. Instead, petrol (Avgas), and jet fuel (e. g. Jet A-1) are used. However, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, numerous series-production aircraft diesel engines that ran on fuel oils were made, because they had several advantages: their fuel consumption was low, they were reliable, not prone to catching fire, and required minimal maintenance. The introduction of petrol direct injection in the 1930s outweighed these advantages, and aircraft diesel engines quickly fell out of use. With improvements in power-to-mass ratios of diesel engines, several on-road diesel engines have been converted to and certified for aircraft use since the early 21st century. These engines typically run on Jet A-1 aircraft fuel (but can also run on diesel fuel). Jet A-1 has ignition characteristics similar to diesel fuel, and is thus suited for certain (but not all) diesel engines.
Military vehicles
Until World War II, several military vehicles, especially those that required high engine performance (armored fighting vehicles, for example the M26 Pershing or Panther tanks), used conventional otto engines and ran on petrol. Ever since World War II, several military vehicles with diesel engines have been made, capable of running on diesel fuel. This is because diesel engines are more fuel efficient, and diesel fuel is less prone to catching fire. Some of these diesel-powered vehicles (such as the Leopard 1 or MAN 630) still ran on petrol, and some military vehicles were still made with otto engines (e. g. Ural-375 or Unimog 404), incapable of running on diesel fuel.
Tractors and heavy equipment
Today’s tractors and heavy equipment are mostly diesel-powered. Among tractors, only the smaller classes may also offer gasoline-fueled engines. The dieselization of tractors and heavy equipment began in Germany before World War II but was unusual in the United States until after that war. During the 1950s and 1960s, it progressed in the US as well. Diesel fuel is commonly used in oil and gas extracting equipment, although some locales use electric or natural gas-powered equipment.
Tractors and heavy equipment were often multifuel in the 1920s through 1940s, running either spark-ignition and low-compression engines, Akroyd engines, or diesel engines. Thus, many farm tractors of the era could burn gasoline, alcohol, kerosene, and any light grade of fuel oil such as heating oil, or tractor vaporizing oil, according to whichever was most affordable in a region at any given time. On US farms during this era, the name “distillate” often referred to any of the aforementioned light fuel oils. Spark ignition engines did not start as well on distillate, so typically a small auxiliary gasoline tank was used for cold starting, and the fuel valves were adjusted several minutes later, after warm-up, to transition to distillate. Engine accessories such as vaporizers and radiator shrouds were also used, both with the aim of capturing heat, because when such an engine was run on distillate, it ran better when both it and the air it inhaled were warmer rather than at ambient temperature. Dieselization with dedicated diesel engines (high-compression with mechanical fuel injection and compression ignition) replaced such systems and made more efficient use of the diesel fuel being burned.
Other uses
Poor quality diesel fuel has been used as an extraction agent for liquid–liquid extraction of palladium from nitric acid mixtures. Such use has been proposed as a means of separating the fission product palladium from PUREX raffinate which comes from used nuclear fuel. In this system of solvent extraction, the hydrocarbons of the diesel act as the diluent while the dialkyl sulfides act as the extractant. This extraction operates by a solvation mechanism. So far, neither a pilot plant nor full scale plant has been constructed to recover palladium, rhodium or ruthenium from nuclear wastes created by the use of nuclear fuel
Diesel fuel is often used as the main ingredient in oil-base mud drilling fluid. The advantage of using diesel is its low cost and its ability to drill a wide variety of difficult strata, including shale, salt and gypsum formations. Diesel-oil mud is typically mixed with up to 40% brine water. Due to health, safety and environmental concerns, Diesel-oil mud is often replaced with vegetable, mineral, or synthetic food-grade oil-base drilling fluids, although diesel-oil mud is still in widespread use in certain regions.
During development of rocket engines in Germany during World War II J-2 Diesel fuel was used as the fuel component in several engines including the BMW 109-718. J-2 diesel fuel was also used as a fuel for gas turbine engines.
is the common term for the distillate fuel oil sold for use in motor vehicles that use the compression ignition engine named for its inventor, German engineer Rudolf Diesel.
Diesel fuel also called diesel oil or historically heavy oil, is any liquid fuel specifically designed for use in a diesel engine, a type of internal combustion engine in which fuel ignition takes place without a spark as a result of compression of the inlet air and then injection of fuel. Therefore, diesel fuel needs good compression ignition characteristics.
The most common type of diesel fuel is a specific fractional distillate of petroleum fuel oil, but alternatives that are not derived from petroleum, such as biodiesel, biomass to liquid (BTL) or gas to liquid (GTL) diesel are increasingly being developed and adopted. To distinguish these types, petroleum-derived diesel is sometimes called Petro diesel in some academic circles. Petro diesel is a high-volume profitable product produced in crude oil refineries.
ORIGIN
Diesel fuel originated from experiments conducted by German scientist and inventor Rudolf Diesel for his compression-ignition engine which he invented around 1892. At first, Diesel tested crude oil from Pechelbronn, but soon replaced it with petrol and kerosene, because crude oil proved to be too viscous with the main testing fuel for the Diesel engine being kerosene (paraffin). Diesel experimented with types of lamp oil from various sources, as well as types of petrol and ligroin, which all worked well as Diesel engine fuels. Later, Diesel tested coal tar creosote, paraffin oil, crude oil, gasoline and fuel oil, which eventually worked as well. In Scotland and France, shale oil was used as fuel for the first 1898 production Diesel engines because other fuels were too expensive.
During his first Diesel engine tests, Diesel also used illuminating gas as fuel, and managed to build functional designs, both with and without pilot injection. This engine proved to be functional, but suffered from piston ring failure after a few minutes due to coal dust deposition.
Before diesel was standardized, diesel engines typically ran on cheap fuel oils. The introduction of motor-vehicle diesel engines, such as the Mercedes-Benz OM 138, in the 1930s meant that higher-quality fuels with proper ignition characteristics were needed. At first no improvements were made to motor-vehicle diesel fuel quality. After World War II, the first modern high-quality diesel fuels were standardized.
DIFFERENT NAMES OF DIESEL
Diesel fuel has many colloquial names; most commonly, it is simply referred to as diesel. In the United Kingdom, diesel fuel for road use is commonly called diesel or sometimes white diesel if required to differentiate it from a reduced-tax agricultural-only product containing an identifying-colored dye known as red diesel. The official term for white diesel is DERV, standing for diesel-engine road vehicle. In Australia, it is also known as distillate (not to be confused with “distillate” in an older sense referring to a different motor fuel), and in Indonesia (as well in Israel), it is known as Solar, a trademarked name from the country’s national petroleum company PERTAMINA. The term gas oil (French: gazole) is sometimes also used to refer to diesel fuel.
TYPES
Diesel fuel is produced from various sources, the most common being petroleum. Other sources include biomass, animal fat, biogas, natural gas, and coal liquefaction.
Petroleum diesel
Petroleum diesel, also called Petro diesel, fossil diesel, or mineral diesel, is the most common type of diesel fuel. It is produced from the fractional distillation of crude oil between 200 and 350 °C (392 and 662 °F) at atmospheric pressure, resulting in a mixture of carbon chains that typically contain between 9 and 25 carbon atoms per molecule.
Synthetic diesel
Synthetic diesel can be produced from any carbonaceous material, including biomass, biogas, natural gas, coal and many others. The raw material is gasified into synthesis gas, which after purification is converted by the Fischer–Tropsch process to a synthetic diesel.
The process is typically referred to as biomass-to-liquid (BTL), gas-to-liquid (GTL) or coal-to-liquid (CTL), depending on the raw material used.
Biodiesel
Biodiesel is obtained from vegetable oil or animal fats (biolipids) which are mainly fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), and trans esterified with methanol. It can be produced from many types of oils, the most common being rapeseed oil (rapeseed methyl ester, RME) in Europe and soybean oil (soy methyl ester, SME) in the US. Methanol can also be replaced with ethanol for the transesterification process, which results in the production of ethyl esters. The transesterification processes use catalysts, such as sodium or potassium hydroxide, to convert vegetable oil and methanol into biodiesel and the undesirable byproducts glycerin and water, which will need to be removed from the fuel along with methanol traces. Biodiesel can be used pure (B100) in engines where the manufacturer approves such use, but it is more often used as a mix with diesel, BXX where XX is the biodiesel content in percent.
Fuel Injection Equipment (FIE) manufacturers have raised several concerns regarding biodiesel, identifying FAME as being the cause of the following problems: corrosion of fuel injection components, low-pressure fuel system blockage, increased dilution and polymerization of engine sump oil, pump seizures due to high fuel viscosity at low temperature, increased injection pressure, elastomeric seal failures and fuel injector spray blockage. Pure biodiesel has an energy content about 5–10% lower than petroleum diesel. The loss in power when using pure biodiesel is 5–7%.
As biodiesel contains low levels of sulfur, the emissions of sulfur oxides and sulfates, major components of acid rain, are low. Use of biodiesel also results in reductions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter.
Hydrogenated oils and fats
This category of diesel fuels involves converting the triglycerides in vegetable oil and animal fats into alkanes by refining and hydrogenation, such as Neste Renewable Diesel or H-Bio. The produced fuel has many properties that are similar to synthetic diesel, and are free from the many disadvantages of FAME.
DME
Dimethyl ether, DME, is a synthetic, gaseous diesel fuel that results in clean combustion with very little soot and reduced NOx emissions.
STORAGE
In the US, diesel is recommended to be stored in a yellow container to differentiate it from kerosene, which is typically kept in blue containers, and gasoline (petrol), which is typically kept in red containers. In the UK, diesel is normally stored in a black container to differentiate it from unleaded or leaded petrol, which are stored in green and red containers, respectively.
USES
Diesel fuel is mostly used in high-speed diesel engines, especially motor-vehicle (e.g. car, lorry) diesel engines, but not all diesel engines run on diesel fuel. For example, large two-stroke watercraft engines typically use heavy fuel oils instead of diesel , and certain types of diesel engines, such as MAN M-System engines, are designed to run on petrol with knock resistances of up to 86 RON. On the other hand, gas turbine and some other types of internal combustion engines, and external combustion engines, can also be designed to take diesel fuel.
On-road vehicles
Trucks and buses, which were often otto-powered in the 1920s through 1950s, are now almost exclusively diesel-powered. Due to its ignition characteristics, diesel fuel is thus widely used in these vehicles. Since diesel fuel is not well-suited for otto engines, passenger cars, which often use otto or otto-derived engines, typically run on petrol instead of diesel fuel. However, especially in Europe and India, many passenger cars have, due to better engine efficiency, diesel engines, and thus run on regular diesel fuel.
Railroad
Diesel displaced coal and fuel oil for steam-powered vehicles in the latter half of the 20th century, and is now used almost exclusively for the combustion engines of self-powered rail vehicles (locomotives and railcars).
Aircraft
In general, diesel engines are not well-suited for planes and helicopters. This is because of the diesel engine’s comparatively low power-to-mass ratio, meaning that diesel engines are typically rather heavy, which is a disadvantage in aircraft. Therefore, there is little need for using diesel fuel in aircraft, and it is not commercially used as aviation fuel. Instead, petrol (Avgas), and jet fuel (e. g. Jet A-1) are used. However, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, numerous series-production aircraft diesel engines that ran on fuel oils were made, because they had several advantages: their fuel consumption was low, they were reliable, not prone to catching fire, and required minimal maintenance. The introduction of petrol direct injection in the 1930s outweighed these advantages, and aircraft diesel engines quickly fell out of use. With improvements in power-to-mass ratios of diesel engines, several on-road diesel engines have been converted to and certified for aircraft use since the early 21st century. These engines typically run on Jet A-1 aircraft fuel (but can also run on diesel fuel). Jet A-1 has ignition characteristics similar to diesel fuel, and is thus suited for certain (but not all) diesel engines.
Military vehicles
Until World War II, several military vehicles, especially those that required high engine performance (armored fighting vehicles, for example the M26 Pershing or Panther tanks), used conventional otto engines and ran on petrol. Ever since World War II, several military vehicles with diesel engines have been made, capable of running on diesel fuel. This is because diesel engines are more fuel efficient, and diesel fuel is less prone to catching fire. Some of these diesel-powered vehicles (such as the Leopard 1 or MAN 630) still ran on petrol, and some military vehicles were still made with otto engines (e. g. Ural-375 or Unimog 404), incapable of running on diesel fuel.
Tractors and heavy equipment
Today’s tractors and heavy equipment are mostly diesel-powered. Among tractors, only the smaller classes may also offer gasoline-fueled engines. The dieselization of tractors and heavy equipment began in Germany before World War II but was unusual in the United States until after that war. During the 1950s and 1960s, it progressed in the US as well. Diesel fuel is commonly used in oil and gas extracting equipment, although some locales use electric or natural gas-powered equipment.
Tractors and heavy equipment were often multifuel in the 1920s through 1940s, running either spark-ignition and low-compression engines, Akroyd engines, or diesel engines. Thus, many farm tractors of the era could burn gasoline, alcohol, kerosene, and any light grade of fuel oil such as heating oil, or tractor vaporizing oil, according to whichever was most affordable in a region at any given time. On US farms during this era, the name “distillate” often referred to any of the aforementioned light fuel oils. Spark ignition engines did not start as well on distillate, so typically a small auxiliary gasoline tank was used for cold starting, and the fuel valves were adjusted several minutes later, after warm-up, to transition to distillate. Engine accessories such as vaporizers and radiator shrouds were also used, both with the aim of capturing heat, because when such an engine was run on distillate, it ran better when both it and the air it inhaled were warmer rather than at ambient temperature. Dieselization with dedicated diesel engines (high-compression with mechanical fuel injection and compression ignition) replaced such systems and made more efficient use of the diesel fuel being burned.
Other uses
Poor quality diesel has been used as an extraction agent for liquid–liquid extraction of palladium from nitric acid mixtures. Such use has been proposed as a means of separating the fission product palladium from PUREX raffinate which comes from used nuclear fuel. In this system of solvent extraction, the hydrocarbons of the diesel act as the diluent while the dialkyl sulfides act as the extractant. This extraction operates by a solvation mechanism. So far, neither a pilot plant nor full scale plant has been constructed to recover palladium, rhodium or ruthenium from nuclear wastes created by the use of nuclear fuel
Diesel is often used as the main ingredient in oil-base mud drilling fluid. The advantage of using diesel is its low cost and its ability to drill a wide variety of difficult strata, including shale, salt and gypsum formations. Diesel-oil mud is typically mixed with up to 40% brine water. Due to health, safety and environmental concerns, Diesel-oil mud is often replaced with vegetable, mineral, or synthetic food-grade oil-base drilling fluids, although diesel-oil mud is still in widespread use in certain regions.
During development of rocket engines in Germany during World War II J-2 diesel was used as the fuel component in several engines including the BMW 109-718. J-2 diesel fuel was also used as a fuel for gas turbine engines.