An experimental study of n-dodecane and the development of an improved kinetic model

Abstract

This work presents new fundamental combustion experimental datasets and propose an improved kinetic model for n-dodecane, a widely used surrogate component for jet fuels and diesel. In the experiments, ignition delay times for n-dodecane, were measured over low-to-high temperature range by combining a heated rapid compression machine (RCM) and a heated shock tube (ST). The measurements cover a wide range of temperatures (621–1320 K), pressures (8, 15 bar) and equivalence ratios (0.5–1.5). Flow reactor oxidation was also carried out over temperature range of 600–1100 K and at equivalence ratios of 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 under atmospheric pressure to provide species evolution profiles of O2, CO, CO2 CH4, C2H4 etc. These datasets were used to develop a mechanism for n-dodecane. New rate coefficients were adopted from recent literature to improve the performance of the model, leading to a model composed of 737 species and 3629 reactions. The present experimental data, as well as a wide range of datasets in literature, were used to evaluate the performance of the model. An overall good agreement of the predictions with the experimental results was observed. This model is anticipated to facilitate the development of kinetic models for jet fuel surrogate.