Abstract
This paper reviews the behavior of diesel-tyre derived fuel blends as a modified fuel for diesel engines. Gas phase de-sulphurisation distillation over membrane sieves was used to prepare tyre derived fuel samples. The samples were blended with 50ppm commercial diesel at various volume ratios. The contamination characteristics of such blends were investigated whereby continuous single pass filtration technique was employed to remove solids contaminants in the fuel blends. It was observed that gas phase de-sulphurisation distillation of crude tyre derived fuel reduces total sulphur content by up to 40%. Blending the distilled tyre derived fuel with low sulphur diesel has shown that up to 25vol. % of distilled tyre fuel can be added to low sulphur diesel without compromising the recommended physical properties of the blend. However the total sulphur content remains higher than the recommended specification as per SANS 342 despite the 85% reduction from the crude tyre derived fuel state.