Flame propagation, autoignition and cobustion in alcohol--petroleum--air mixtures and other alternative fuels

Technical Report · Tue Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 1978

OSTI ID:6023139

Henein, N A

The main goal of this program is to determine the combustion characteristics of alternative fuels such as alcohols, alcohol-petroleum blends, and coal and oil shale derivatives in gasoline, diesel, and gas turbine engines. The approach consists of studying the process of combustion in actual engines to obtain data needed to either design new engines or modify and adapt existing engines to the alternative fuels. This includes both experimental and theoretical work. 1. The experimental work consists of instrumenting and running tests on three research engines and measuring the following combustion characteristics: (a) motor octane number of the fuel, (b) flame speed, (c) flammability limits, (d) cycle-to-cycle variations, (e) emissions, (f) performance parameters, such as power and economy, (h) ignition delay, and (i) cetane number of the fuel. The present cetane scale was evaluated and found unsuitable to rate the low ignition quality fuels. A new modified scale that is suitable for rating all fuels was developed. 2. The theoretical work includes: (a) calculating and correlating the flame speed with different fuel properties and engine operating parameters, (b) determining the effect of turbulence, (c) correlating the ignition delay with air and fuel properties, (d) characterizing the fuels by determining the global activation energy for the autoignition reaction, and correlating it to the cetane number of the fuel, and (e) studying in detail the combustion parameters used in the cetane scale. The flame propagation work is being done on a CFR-octane engine and uses methanol-gasoline blends in different compositions. A new technique was developed during the course of this work to measure the flame progress in the engine.The autoignition work is being done on a single cylinder TACOM research diesel engine. A new technique was developed to sample the gases during the ignition delay.

• Research Organization: Wayne State Univ., Detroit, MI (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6023139
• Report Number(s): COO-4486-4
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

090210* -- Alcohol Fuels-- Properties-- (1976-1989)
10 SYNTHETIC FUELS
33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS
330800 -- Emission Control-- Alternative Fuels
ALCOHOLS
ANTIKNOCK RATINGS
AUTOMOTIVE FUELS
BENCH-SCALE EXPERIMENTS
DATA
DATA FORMS
DIESEL ENGINES
DIESEL FUELS
ENGINES
FLAME PROPAGATION
FUELS
GASOHOL PROGRAM
GRAPHS
HYDROXY COMPOUNDS
IGNITION
INFORMATION
INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
METHANOL
NUMERICAL DATA
ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
PERFORMANCE TESTING
SPARK IGNITION ENGINES
TESTING