Reference components of jet fuels: kinetic modeling and experimental results

The goal of this work is to give some kinetic insight on the autoignition and combustion behaviour of full boiling range hydrocarbon fuels. The initial attention is devoted to the selection of possible components of a surrogate that reproduces the reaction behaviour of typical real fuels. n-Dodecane and iso-cetane are the reference components for the different alkane classes, while methylcyclohexane and decalin represented naphthenes and alphamethylnaphthalene represented aromatics. Several oxidation results have been obtained in a pressurized flow reactor both for neat components and selected mixtures. The reactivity maps of the different experiments are reported in terms of CO production. The experimental results clearly confirm that autoignition properties of the mixture cannot be simply reproduced by linear blending rules. Semi-detailed or lumped kinetic models for the oxidation and combustion of pure components are briefly discussed and model predictions are compared with the overall set of experimental measurements. The general agreement with the experimental data, including the mixtures, indicates the viability and interest of the proposed approach. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.