Improving the viscosity and density of n-butanol as alternative to gasoline by blending with dimethyl carbonate

Abstract

n-Butanol is a promising alternative to gasoline, but has the defect of high viscosity, while dimethyl carbonate (DMC), which is a good additive for gasoline to improve the combustion efficiency, has low viscosity. In this work, DMC is used as additive to reduce the viscosity of n-butanol. The viscosities of DMC + n-butanol binary mixtures were measured from 313.15 K to 343.15 K and at pressures up to 15 MPa over the mole fractions from 0.1 to 0.9. The densities of the mixtures were also measured to check the effect of DMC on the density of n-butanol. Experimental results show that DMC can greatly reduce viscosity, and meanwhile increase the density, which is expected to improve the performance of n-butanol as the alternative to gasoline. The dependence of the improvement of the density and viscosity of n-butanol caused by adding DMC on temperature and pressure are investigated to guide the optimization of combustion process. Two models were proposed for the calculation of the viscosities and densities of the binary mixtures of DMC and n-butanol with the average absolute relative deviations of 0.09% and 2.58%, respectively.