Rate Controlled Constrained-Equilibrium Simulation of Ethanol Combustion Using SVD Derived Constraints

Abstract

Abstract In this study, the fully automatable Approximate Singular Value Decomposition of the Actual Degrees of Disequilibrium (ASVDADD) method is used for combustion modeling of ethanol. Due to the importance of ethanol as one of the most common type of biofuels, modeling its reaction kinetics and chemical composition evolution during combustion is necessary. The detailed kinetic mechanism (DKM) considered here is generated by authors using reaction mechanism generator (RMG) technique and it consists of 66 species and 1031 reactions. Tracking this number of species and chemical reactions in computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis of engineering problems is prohibitive. To alleviate this issue, Rate-Controlled Constrained-Equilibrium (RCCE) model reduction scheme for chemical kinetics is employed. It describes the evolution of a complex chemical system with acceptable accuracy with a number of rates controlling constraints on the associated constrained-equilibrium states of the system, much lower than the number of species in the underlying DKM. Successful approximation of the constrained equilibrium states requires accurate identification of the constraints. One promising procedure is the ASVDADD method that is capable of identifying the best constraints for a given range of thermodynamic conditions and a required level of approximation. ASVDADD is based on simple algebraic analysis of the results of the underlying DKM simulation and is focused on the behavior of the degrees of disequilibrium (DoD) of the individual chemical reactions. In this paper, ASVDADD is used to derive the RCCE constraints and ethanol combustion is modeled using both DKM and RCCE. Comparison of RCCE results with those of DKM shows the effectiveness of the ASVDADD derived constraints which demonstrates the potential of the RCCE method for combustion modeling of heavy and complex fuels.