AbstractsEngineering

Practical fuels are a complex mixture of thousands of hydrocarbon compounds, making it challenging and difficult to study their combustion behavior. It’s generally agreed that in order to study these complex practical fuels a much simpler approach of studying simple fuel surrogates containing limited number of components is more feasible. Ethanol and n-heptane have been studied as primary reference fuels in the surrogate study of gasoline and diesel over the past few decades. The objective of the following thesis has been to study the autoignition characteristics of ethanol and n-heptane and validate chemical kinetic mechanisms. The validation of a chemical kinetic mechanism provides a deeper insight into the combustion behavior of the fuels which can be further used to study advanced combustion concepts. Experiments have been conducted on the rapid compression machine (RCM) and validated against mechanisms from literature study. Rapid compression machines have been primarily used to study chemical kinetics at low to intermediate temperatures and high pressures for their accuracy and reproducibility. For the following study experiments span over a range of temperature (650-1000 K), pressure (10, 15 and 20 bar) and equivalence ratio (¿=0.3, 0.5, 1). Experimental data based on the adiabatic volumetric expansion approach have been modeled numerically using the Sandia SENKIN code in conjunction with CHEMKIN. Experiments have been primarily focused on validating kinetic mechanisms at low to intermediate temperatures and elevated pressures. Ignition delay time data from experiments have been deduced based on the pressure and time histories. A brute sensitivity and flux analysis has been performed to reveal the key sensitive reactions and the dominant reaction pathways followed under the present experimental conditions. Improvements have been suggested and discrepancies noted in order to develop a valid chemical kinetic mechanism. Under the present experimental conditions for the study of ethanol, reactions involving hydroperoxyl radicals, namely C2H5OH+H¿2 and CH3CHO+ H¿2 as well as the formation of H2O2 from H¿2 radical and its subsequent decomposition have been found to be sensitive. Based on the following, improvements and developements have been suggested to increase the accuracy and predictability of the mechanisms studied.Ignition delay data from experiments have been compared against those obtained from the mechanism used in the study for n-heptane. Discrepancies have been found in the low temperature region, with the mechanism under predicting the first ignition delay. The causes for the discrepancy have been noted to be due to the NTC behaviour exhibited during the two stage ignition of n-heptane. At low temperatures the reaction pathway proceeded by chain branching mainly due to the ketohydroperoxide species reaction pathway has been analysed. As the temperature of the reaction increases the reaction pathway is dominated by the Q ¿OOH species propagation resulting in the formation of conjugate olefins and…