Development of an ethanol combustion mechanism based on a hierarchical optimization approach

A detailed multi-purpose reaction mechanism for ethanol combustion was developed for the use in high-fidelity numerical simulations describing ignition, flame propagation and species concentration profiles with high accuracy. Justified by prior analysis, an optimization of 44 Arrhenius parameters of 14 crucial elementary reactions using several thousand direct and indirect measurement data points was performed, starting from the ethanol combustion mechanism of Saxena and Williams (2007). The final optimized mechanism was compared to 13 reaction mechanisms frequently used in ethanol combustion with respect to their accuracy in reproducing the various types of experimental data