Mechanism of the oxidation and combustion of normal paraffin hydrocarbons: Transition from C1–C6 to C7H16

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Recently, detailed kinetic mechanisms of the oxidation and combustion of higher hydrocarbons, composed of hundreds of components and thousands of elementary reactions, have been proposed. Despite the undoubtful advantages of such detailed mechanisms, their application to simulations of turbulent combustion and gas dynamic phenomena is difficult because of their complexity. At the same time, to some extent limited, they cannot be considered exhaustive. This work applies previously proposed algorithm for constructing an optimal mechanism of the high- and low-temperature oxidation and combustion of normal paraffin hydrocarbons, which takes into account the main processes determining the reaction rate and the formation of key intermediates and final products. The mechanism has the status of a nonempirical detailed mechanism, since all the constituent elementary reactions have a kinetic substantiation. The mechanism has two specific features: (1) it does not include reactions of so-called double oxygen addition (first to the peroxide radical, and then to its isomeric form), i.e., the first addition turns out to be sufficient; (2) it does not include isomeric compounds and their derivatives as intermediates, since this oxidation pathway is slower than the oxidation of molecules and radicals with normal structure. Application of the algorithm makes it possible to compile a compact mechanism, which is important for modeling chemical processes involving paraffin hydrocarbons C n with large n. Previously, based on this algorithm, compact mechanisms of the oxidation and combustion of propane, n-butane, n-pentane, n-hexane, n-heptane, n-octane, n-nonane, and n-decane have been constructed. In this work, we constructed a nonempirical detailed mechanism of the oxidation and combustion of hydrocarbons from n-undecane to n-hexadecane. The most important feature of the new mechanism is its staged nature, which manifests itself through the emergence of cool and blue flames during low-temperature autoignition. The calculation results are compared with experimental data.