Combustion of petroleum-based transportation fuels and their blends with biofuels
- Cornell University
The atmospheric pressure results presented show that n-heptane and iso-butanol mixtures had droplet diameter squares that decreased nearly linearly with time during burning while the flame standoff ratio increased throughout burning. Increasing the iso-butanol fraction decreased the burning-rate because of the accompanying increase in the density of the iso-butanol compared to heptane. At the same time, increasing iso-butanol mixture fraction appreciably reduced the maximum acetylene mole fraction and the sooting tendency. The mechanism is consistent with carbon atoms in iso-butanol binding to oxygen atoms that cannot then be transformed into soot. Computational and experimental results exhibited generally very good agreement. The simulated flame diameters bounded the measurements using definitions of flame diameter based on the maximum temperature and maximum OH mole fraction. With the simulations validated by the experiments, predictions of the peak acetylene concentrations as a soot precursor were made and found to occur very near the 1350 K isotherm as a soot inception temperature. Moreover, simulated greenhouse gas concentrations (CO2) were not appreciably changed with increasing iso-butanol concentration. As such, the results show a tradeoff with iso-butanol addition, namely that mixture droplets burn slower but produce less particulates and with little influence on formation of CO2 as a representative greenhouse gas.
- Research Organization:
- DOE Bioenergy Technologies Office
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0007978
- OSTI ID:
- 1998563
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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