Hydrotreated Renewable Jet Fuel Ignition Delay Performance in a Military Diesel Engine: An Experimental and Modeling Study

Author(s):  
Jim S. Cowart ◽  
Warren Fischer ◽  
Len J. Hamilton ◽  
Patrick A. Caton ◽  
S. Mani Sarathy ◽  
...  

In an effort towards predicting the combustion behavior of a new fuel in a conventional diesel engine, Hydrotreated Renewable Jet (HRJ) fuel was first run in a military diesel engine across the entire speed-load operating range. Ignition delay was characterized for this fuel at each operating condition. Next, a HRJ surrogate fuel was developed in order to predict the combustion performance of this new renewable fuel. A chemical ignition delay was then predicted across the speed-load range using a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism model based on an 8-component surrogate representative of HRJ. The modeling suggests that rich fuel-air parcels developed from the diesel spray are the first to ignite. The chemical ignition delay results also show decreasing ignition delays with increasing engine load and speed just as shown by the empirical data. A moderate difference between the total and chemical ignition delays was then characterized as a physical delay period which scales inversely with engine speed. The approach used in this study suggests that the ignition delay and thus start of combustion may be predicted with reasonable accuracy allowing for the analytical assessment of the acceptability of a new fuel in a conventional engine.

Author(s):  
Len Hamilton ◽  
Jim Cowart ◽  
Dianne Luning Prak

There are currently numerous efforts to create renewable fuels that have similar properties to conventional diesel fuels. One major future challenge is evaluating how these new fuels will function in older legacy diesel engines. It is desired to have physically based modeling tools that will predict new fuel performance without extensive full scale engine testing. This study evaluates two modeling tools that are used together to predict ignition delay in a military diesel engine running n-hexadecane as a fuel across the engine’s speed-load range. AVL-FIRE® is used to predict the physical delay of the fuel from the start of injection until the formation of a combustible mixture. Then a detailed LLNL chemical kinetic mechanism is used to predict the chemical ignition delay. This total model predicted ignition delay is then compared to the experimental engine data. The combined model predicted results show good agreement to that of the experimental data across the engine operating range with the chemical delay being a larger fraction of the total ignition delay. This study shows that predictive tools have the potential to evaluate new fuel combustion performance.


Author(s):  
Len Hamilton ◽  
Dianne Luning Prak ◽  
Jim Cowart

There are currently numerous efforts to create renewable fuels that have similar properties to conventional diesel fuels. One major future challenge is evaluating how these new fuels will function in older legacy diesel engines. It is desired to have physically based modeling tools that will predict new fuel performance without extensive full scale engine testing. This study evaluates two modeling tools that are used together to predict ignition delay in a military diesel engine running n-hexadecane as a fuel across the engine's speed-load range. AVL-FIRE® is used to predict the physical delay of the fuel from the start of injection until the formation of a combustible mixture. Then a detailed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) chemical kinetic mechanism is used to predict the chemical ignition delay. This total model predicted ignition delay is then compared to the experimental engine data. The combined model predicted results show good agreement to that of the experimental data across the engine operating range with the chemical delay being a larger fraction of the total ignition delay. This study shows that predictive tools have the potential to evaluate new fuel combustion performance.


Author(s):  
Leonard J. Hamilton ◽  
Sherry A. Williams ◽  
Richard A. Kamin ◽  
Matthew A. Carr ◽  
Patrick A. Caton ◽  
...  

A new Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) from the camelina plant has been processed into a Hydrotreated Renewable Jet (HRJ) fuel. This HRJ fuel was tested in an extensively instrumented legacy military diesel engine along with conventional Navy jet fuel JP-5. Both fuels performed well across the speed-load range of this HMMWV engine. The high cetane value of the HRJ leads to modestly shorter ignition delay. The longer ignition delay of JP-5 delivers shorter overall combustion durations, with associated higher indicated engine torque levels. Both brake torque and brake fuel consumption are better with conventional JP-5 by up to ten percent, due to more ideal combustion characteristics.


Author(s):  
Seung Eon Jang ◽  
Jin Park ◽  
Sang Hyeon Han ◽  
Hong Jip Kim ◽  
Ki Sung Jung ◽  
...  

Abstract In this study, the auto ignition with low limit temperature of syngas has been numerically investigated using a 2-D numerical analysis. Previous study showed that auto ignition was observed at above 860 K in co-flow jet experiments using syngas and dry air. However, the auto ignition at this low temperature range could not be predicted with existing chemical mechanisms. Inconsistency of the auto ignition temperature between the experimental and numerical results is thought to be due to the inaccuracy of the chemical kinetic mechanism. The prediction of ignition delay time and sensitivity analysis for each chemical kinetic mechanism were performed to verify the reasons of the inconsistency between the experimental and numerical results. The results which were calculated using the various mechanisms showed significantly differences in the ignition delay time. In this study, we intend to analyze the reason of discrepancy to predict the auto ignition with low pressure and low temperature region of syngas and to improve the chemical kinetic mechanism. A sensitive analysis has been done to investigate the reaction steps which affected the ignition delay time significantly, and the reaction rate of the selected reaction step was modified. Through the modified chemical kinetic mechanism, we could identify the auto ignition in the low temperature region from the 2-D numerical results. Then CEMA (Chemical Explosive Mode Analysis) was used to validate the 2-D numerical analysis with modified chemical kinetic mechanism. From the validation, the calculated λexp, EI, and PI showed reasonable results, so we expect that the modified chemical kinetic mechanism can be used in various low temperature region.


Author(s):  
Shaoping Shi ◽  
Daniel Lee ◽  
Sandra McSurdy ◽  
Michael McMillian ◽  
Steven Richardson ◽  
...  

In any theoretical investigation of ignition processes in natural gas reciprocating engines, physical and chemical mechanisms must be adequately modeled and validated in an independent manner. The Rapid Compression Machine (RCM) has been used in the past as a tool to validate both autoignition models as well as turbulent mixing effects. In this study, two experimental cases were examined. In the first experimental case, the experimental measurements of Lee and Hochgreb (1998a) were chosen to validate the simulation results. In their experiments, hydrogen/oxygen/argon mixtures were used as reactants. In the simulations, a reduced chemical kinetic mechanism consisting of 10 species and 19 elementary reactions coupled to a CFD software, Fluent 6, was used to simulate the autoignition. The ignition delay from the simulation agreed very well with that from the experimental data of Lee and Hochgreb, (1998b). In the second case, experimental data derived from an RCM with two opposed, pneumatically driven pistons (Brett et al., 2001) were used to study the autoignition of methane/oxygen/argon mixtures. The reduced chemical kinetic mechanism DRM22, derived from the GRI-Mech reaction scheme coupled to Fluent 6, was applied in the simulations. The DRM22 scheme included 22 species and 104 reactions. When methane/oxygen/argon mixture were simulated for the RCM, the ignition delay deviated about 15% from the experimental results. The simulation approaches as well as the validation results are discussed in detail in this paper. The paper also discusses an evaluation of reduced reaction models available in the literature for subsequent Fluent modeling.


1988 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.-W. Kuo ◽  
K.-J. Wu ◽  
S. Henningsen

A quasi-steady gas-jet model was applied to examine the spray trajectory in swirling flow during the ignition-delay period in an open-chamber diesel engine timed to start combustion at top dead center. Spray penetration, deflection, and the fractions of too-lean-mixed, burnable, and overpenetrated fuel at the start of combustion were calculated by employing the measured ignition delay and mean fuel-injection velocity. The calculated parameters were applied to correlate the measured exhaust hydrocarbon (HC) emissions. The engine parameters examined were bowl geometry, compression ratio, overall air-fuel ratio, and speed. Both the ignition delay and the relative spray-penetration parameter, defined as the ratio of the spray-penetration distances at the moments of start of combustion and wall impingement, gave good correlations for some of the engine parameters examined but could not explain all the measured trends. However, good correlation of the measured exhaust HC emissions was obtained by using the calculated too-lean-mixed and overpenetrated fuel fractions at the start of combustion. Correlation of the overpenetrated fuel with the measured HC indicated that approximately 2 percent of the fuel mass that overpenetrated before start of combustion emitted from the engine as unburned HC. This could account for 0 to 65 percent of the total HC emission from this engine. Additionally, it was found that the too-lean-mixed fuel could contribute 10 to 30 percent of the total HC emission, as found in a previous study on a somewhat similar engine. The remaining HC emission is caused by other sources such as bulk quenching.


Author(s):  
Chitralkumar V. Naik ◽  
Karthik V. Puduppakkam ◽  
Abhijit Modak ◽  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Ellen Meeks

Validated surrogate models have been developed for two Fisher-Tropsch (F-T) fuels. The models started with a systematic approach to determine an appropriate surrogate fuel composition specifically tailored for the two alternative jet-fuel samples. A detailed chemical kinetic mechanism has been assembled for these model surrogates starting from literature sources, and then improved to ensure self-consistency of the kinetics and thermodynamic data. This mechanism has been tested against fundamental laboratory data on auto-ignition times, laminar flame-speeds, extinction strain rates, and NOx emissions. Literature data used to validate the mechanism include both the individual surrogate-fuel components and actual F-T fuel samples where available. As part of the validation, simulations were performed for a wide variety of experimental configurations, as well as a wide range of temperatures and equivalence ratios for fuel/air mixtures. Comparison of predicted surrogate-fuel behavior against data on real F-T fuel behavior also show the effectiveness of the surrogate-matching approach and the accuracy of the detailed-kinetics mechanisms. The resulting validated mechanism has been also reduced through application of automated mechanism reduction techniques to provide progressively smaller mechanisms, with different degrees of accuracy, that are reasonable for use in CFD simulations employing detailed kinetics.


Author(s):  
Ziliang Zheng ◽  
Tamer Badawy ◽  
Naeim Henein ◽  
Peter Schihl ◽  
Eric Sattler

Sasol isomerized paraffinic kerosene (IPK) is a coal-derived synthetic fuel under consideration as a blending stock with jet propellant 8 (JP-8) for use in military equipment. However, Sasol IPK is a low ignition quality fuel with derived cetane number (DCN) of 31. The proper use of such alternative fuels in internal combustion engines (ICEs) requires the modification in control strategies to operate engines efficiently. With computational cycle simulation coupled with surrogate fuel mechanism, the engine development process is proved to be very effective. Therefore, a methodology to formulate Sasol IPK surrogate fuels for diesel engine application using ignition quality tester (IQT) is developed. An in-house developed matlab code is used to formulate the appropriate mixture blends, also known as surrogate fuel. And aspen hysys is used to emulate the distillation curve of the surrogate fuels. The properties of the surrogate fuels are compared to those of the target Sasol IPK fuel. The DCNs of surrogate fuels are measured in the IQT and compared with the target Sasol IPK fuel at the standard condition. Furthermore, the ignition delay, combustion gas pressure, and rate of heat release (RHR) of Sasol IPK and its formulated surrogate fuels are analyzed and compared at five different charge temperatures. In addition, the apparent activation energies derived from chemical ignition delay of the surrogate fuel and Sasol IPK are determined and compared.


Author(s):  
Michael V. Johnson ◽  
S. Scott Goldsborough ◽  
Timothy A. Smith ◽  
Steven S. McConnell

Continued interest in kinetically-modulated combustion regimes, such as HCCI and PCCI, poses a significant challenge in controlling the ignition timing due to the lack of direct control of combustion phasing hardware available in traditional SI and CI engines. Chemical kinetic mechanisms, validated based on fundamental data from experiments like rapid compression machines and shock tubes, offer reasonably accurate predictions of ignition timing; however utilizing these requires high computational cost making them impractical for use in engine control schemes. Empirically-derived correlations offer faster control, but are generally not valid beyond the narrow range of conditions over which they were derived. This study discusses initial work in the development of an ignition correlation based on a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism for three component gasoline surrogate, composed of n-heptane, iso-octane and toluene, or toluene reference fuel (TRF). Simulations are conducted over a wide range of conditions including temperature, pressure, equivalence ratio and dilution for a range of tri-component blends in order to produce ignition delay time and investigate trends in ignition as pressure, equivalence ratio, temperature and fuel reactivity are varied. A modified, Arrhenius-based power law formulation will be used in a future study to fit the computed ignition delay times.


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