Combustion kinetics of alternative jet fuels, Part-II: Reaction model for fuel surrogate

Abstract

Conventional transportation fuels used in aviation (jet fuel) or in ground transportation (gasoline, diesel) contain multitude of hydrocarbon components and are difficult to be modeled, if one has to consider each of the component present. A typical approach is the definition of a fuel surrogate with a limited number of fuel components. In this context, a single semi-detailed high temperature reaction kinetic mechanism is presented in this work, which contains all the important molecular classes required for the detailed surrogate modeling of a hydrocarbon fuel. The appeal of the mechanism is the suitability for a broad range of technical fuels covering gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. The reaction mechanism for hydrocarbon combustion is consisted of 238 species and 1814 reactions and is rigorously validated for 70 neat hydrocarbon components over a wide range of experimental conditions including combustion setups such as shock-tubes, laminar flames, jet-stirred and flow reactors.The purpose of this study is to provide a single reaction model that (1) includes variety of hydrocarbon molecules of varying degree of complexity and carbon numbers, (2) has capability to model a spectrum of different fuels, initially aviation fuels, and (3) is compact to apply both in simple (fundamental kinetic investigations) and complex geometries (CFD studies) of combustion system enabled through customized mechanism reductions. The ultimate goal is to resolve the fuel differences using the model predictions obtained from the reaction mechanism that will supply parameters for fuel design and optimization of fuels. Extensive supporting information is available in this work.