Autoignition Characteristics of Diesel Fuel and its Surrogates

The design process for development of engines could be made faster and less expensive with the help of computations which help understanding the processes prevalent in internal combustion engines. Running engine simulations are challenging as they need to accurately capture the fluid dynamic and chemical kinetic processes that occur in an engine. A major challenge in simulating chemical kinetic processes is the complexity of the fuel chemistry: real fuels are complex mixtures whose composition determines their physical properties and reactivity. The behavior of these real fuels can be conveniently represented using simpler mixtures often called “surrogates mixtures” that match the key properties of the real fuels. Successful modeling of the ignition of real fuel first requires the formulation of an appropriate surrogate mixture whose compositions are carefully chosen in order to best emulate the combustion properties of the targeted real fuel. Then a comprehensive chemical kinetic model developed based on the surrogate fuel is used to simulate the combustion process of the real fuel. The work presented in the current dissertation intends to systematically study the surrogate modeling of diesel fuels. The study has been conducted to understand the ignition of surrogate fuel constituents and fully blended diesel fuels. Autoignition of tetralin, 1-methylnaphthalene, iso-cetane, and n-dodecane, the constituents of diesel surrogates, are investigated in the current dissertation. Besides, ignition of binary blends of the surrogate constituents has also been studied to investigate the effects of blending on ignition when neat components are blended to formulate a surrogate fuel. Furthermore, the ignition of two fully blended research grade diesel fuels has also been conducted inorder to provide quality ignition delay data for development and validation of chemical kinetic models of kinetic fuels