Pollutant formation in premixed and diffusion flames of paraffinic fuels using the reduced Utah Surrogate Mechanisms

Normal heptane, isooctane and cyclohexane have been the most interested surrogate components for liquid transportation and aviation fuels, due to their roles as indicative fuels for octane number and the representative compounds for normal, iso and cyclo-paraffins. Methodologies of mechanism generation for these representative fuel fractions have been discussed in detail in literature. The basics of fuel consumption in flames have been discussed by Vovelle1, Ranzi2, Zhang3 and coworkers, among others. Ranzi et al.2 presented a lumping technique that was also discussed in detail in an earlier study3 and used for generation of reaction mechanisms that can be used to model flames of liquid fuels. The lumping approach is an effective reduction technique for models of large aliphatic fuels. Reaction pathway analysis presents another reduction technique that was used to reduce a complete kinetic set to smaller models. Doute et al.4 reduced a n-decane model by removing less important reaction routes systematically and still obtained satisfactory agreement between the experimental data and predicted results. Bollig et al.5 proposed a reduced n-heptane mechanism and modeled a diffusion flame with the emphasis on pollutant-related intermediates. The mechanism was further reduced using another technique with the assumption of partial equilibrium for intermediates. There are many important applications that need reduced kinetic mechanism, especially in those that require expensive computations but are less demanding in kinetic details. For example, only a few dozen reactions can be comfortably acquired in aerodynamic applications. In this study, the detailed Utah Surrogate Mechanisms of about 1200 reactions and 210 species3 will be reduced by a combined technique. The resultant mechanism will be used to simulate premixed and counter-flow diffusion flames of normal heptane, iso-octane and cyclo-hexane fuels. And the pollutant formation of soot precursors, e.g. benzene and acetylene, will be investigated for the three common surrogate components.