Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Combustion Characteristics of a Tier II Gasoline Certification Fuel and its Surrogate with Iso-butanol: experiments and detailed numerical modeling

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1997992

This presentation will describe results of an experimental and numerical study of combustion of a Tier II gasoline certification fuel and its surrogate blended with iso-butanol as a potential biofuel additive. The experiments were carried out under conditions where gas transport originated entirely by fuel evaporation with external convection (both forced and natural) were minimized. The resulting near spherically symmetric droplet flames were amenable to detailed numerical modeling. The droplet initial diameters were in the narrow range of 0.55 mm to 0.62 mm while and burning is performed under standard atmosphere. The combustion characteristics such as evolution of droplet, flame and soot shell diameters for indolene/iso-butanol and surrogate/iso-butanol mixtures are compared. The presence of iso-butanol is experimentally found to reduce the formation of soot as the iso-butanol concentration was increased. Simulations are also reported using a detailed kinetic chemistry comprised of 324 species and 17608 reactions using the CRECK POLIMI mechanism. The detailed numerical model included unsteady gas and liquid transport, soot chemistry and radiative transport. Droplet burn rates were well predicted while flame diameters showed more variability depending on how the flame was defined in the numerical simulation (peak gas temperature and OH concentration). Simulations also show the influence of iso-butanol concentration on flame temperature, greenhouse gas emissions and particulate emissions.

Research Organization:
American Chemical Society, Chicago, Ill.
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
EE0007978
OSTI ID:
1997992
Report Number(s):
DOE-CORNELL-0007978
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English