Experimental Study of Droplet Evaporation of Different Hydrocarbon Fuels

This work experimentally investigates the evaporation process of kerosene, gasoline, ethanol, and acetone hydrocarbon fuels, and water for comparison. The experiments were performed on free-flying droplet, under gravity force only, in a cylindrical evaporation chamber at atmospheric pressure and controlled temperatures from 25 to 100 degrees C. Diffusion controlled evaporation is the only mode considered in this study by keeping the chamber temperature less than the boiling temperature of the fuels. The droplet was photographed asAit flew down using a high-speed camera. The extracted images from the camera were analyzed using MATLAB code. The droplet is assumed to be spherical. The results showed that the evaporation rate increases logarithmically with the increase in the temperature of the evaporation chamber for all tested fuels. When the temperature was raised from 25 to 45 degrees C, the droplet lifetime of acetone, ethanol, gasoline, kerosene, and water decreased by 63%, 66.7%, 59.1%, 67.7%, Aand 70.5%, Arespectively. Increasing the temperature leads to an increase in the rate of evaporation and thus reduces the lifetime of the droplet. The evaporation constantly rose by 0.00767, 0.02159, 0.00693, 0.02, and 0.015 mm2/s for every degrees C for kerosene, acetone, water, ethanol, and gasoline, respectively.