DOE Project 18546, AOP Task 1.1, Fuel Effects on Advanced Combustion Engines

Research in 2011 was focused on diesel range fuels and diesel combustion and fuels evaluated in 2011 included a series of oxygenated biofuels fuels from University of Maine, oxygenated fuel compounds representing materials which could be made from sewage, oxygenated marine diesel fuels for low emissions, and a new series of FACE fuel surrogates and FACE fuels with detailed exhaust chemistry and particulate size measurements. Fuels obtained in late 2011, which will be evaluated in 2012, include a series of oil shale derived fuels from PNNL, green diesel fuel (hydrotreated vegetable oil) from UOP, University of Maine cellulosic biofuel (levulene), and pyrolysis derived fuels from UOP pyrolysis oil, upgraded at University of Georgia. We were able to demonstrate, through a project with University of Wisconsin, that a hybrid strategy for fuel surrogates provided both accurate and rapid CFD combustion modeling for diesel HCCI. In this strategy, high molecular weight compounds are used to more accurately represent physical processes and smaller molecular weight compounds are used for chemistry to speed chemical calculations. We conducted a small collaboration with sp3H, a French company developing an on-board fuel quality sensor based on near infrared analysis to determine how to use fuel property and chemistry information for engine control. We were able to show that selected outputs from the sensor correlated to both fuel properties and to engine performance. This collaboration leveraged our past statistical analysis work and further work will be done as opportunity permits. We conducted blending experiments to determine characteristics of ethanol blends based on the gasoline characteristics used for blending. Results indicate that much of the octane benefits gained by high level ethanol blending can be negated by use of low octane gasoline blend stocks, as allowed by ASTM D5798. This may limit ability to optimize engines for improved efficiency with ethanol fuels. Extensive data from current and previous years was leveraged into participation with several large proposal teams, as our fuels database covers a very wide range of conventional and emerging fuels and biofuels