A high pressure shock tube study of pyrolysis of real jet fuel Jet A

Abstract

A typical Jet A fuel was pyrolyzed in a high-pressure shock tube at 25 and 90 atm under highly diluted conditions from 900 to 2200 K. The key species produced from the pyrolysis process were measured by gas chromatography as a function of the shock temperature. It was found that despite the compositional complexity of the fuel, the major pyrolysis products include a handful of species. They are ethylene, methane, hydrogen, propene, 1-butene, iso-butene, benzene, toluene, acetylene, 1,3-butadiene, allene and propyne, etc. Among them, ethylene is the most dominant species. The HyChem model recently proposed for the same fuel was used for prediction and comparison with the experimental data. Considering that the HyChem model was developed using shock tube and flow reactor data collected over a range of conditions significantly different from those of the current study, the agreement between the current experiment and model prediction is satisfactory. A Monte Carlo analysis was carried out that examined the sensitivities of the model predictions to the rate parameters. The results indicate that the effects of the uncertainties of A factors and those of activation energy are of significance in different temperature regions. Moreover, the low temperature region is dominated by the fuel pyrolysis reactions, while the high temperature region is dominated by the foundational chemistry which describes the pyrolysis and oxidation of fuel pyrolysis products.