Emulating the Combustion Behavior of Real Jet Aviation Fuels by Surrogate Mixtures of Hydrocarbon Fluid Blends: Implications for Science and Engineering

CATEGORY: SURROGATE FUELS 
Emulating the Combustion Behavior of Real Jet Aviation Fuels by Surrogate Mixtures of Hydrocarbon Fluid Blends: Implications for Science and Engineering

Type	Journal Article
Author	Frederick L. Dryer
Author	Saeed Jahangirian
URL	http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ef500284x
Volume	28
Issue	5
Pages	3474-3485
Publication	Energy & Fuels
Date	May 15, 2014
Abstract	Authors have shown in prior work that a surrogate fuel mixture of known pure hydrocarbon species that closely matches four combustion property targets (the derived cetane number (DCN), the hydrogen to carbon molar ratio (H/C), the threshold soot index (TSI), and the average molecular weight) of a specific jet fuel, exhibits fully prevaporized global combustion kinetic behaviors that are closely consistent. In this article, they demonstrate a similar result can be obtained by formulating surrogate hydrocarbon fluid mixtures from distillation cuts of molecular class hydrocarbons, or even real gas turbine fuels. Their research results support that surrogate fuels, each with similar fully prevaporized global combustion behaviors but different physical properties (viscosity, surface tension, class composition, distillation curve) and even different functional class distributions across their distillation curve, can be formulated using mixtures of hydrocarbon fluids. This ability can be used to advantage to investigate experimentally the relative importance of physical and chemical kinetic properties in both fundamental and applied multiphase combustion experiments. Surrogates formulated from varied sources of hydrocarbon fluids of differing molecular classes, and even fractional distillation cuts from fluid streams can facilitate unraveling the fuel property sensitivities of combustion/emissions performance for specific combustor configurations and operating conditions.