Hydrocarbon fuels for advanced combustion engines consist of complex mixtures of hundreds or even thousands of different components. These components can be grouped into a number of chemically distinct classes, consisting of n-paraffins, branched paraffins, cyclic paraffins, olefins, oxygenates, and aromatics. Biodiesel contains its own unique chemical class called methyl esters. The fractional amounts of these chemical classes are quite different in gasoline, diesel fuel, oil-sand derived fuels and bio-derived fuels, which contributes to the very different combustion characteristics of each of these types of combustion systems. The objectives of this project are: (1) Develop detailed chemical kinetic models for fuel components used in surrogate fuels for diesel and HCCI engines; (2) Develop surrogate fuel models to represent real fuels and model low temperature combustion strategies in HCCI and diesel engines that lead to low emissions and high efficiency; and (3) Characterize the role of fuel composition on low temperature combustion modes of advanced combustion engines.

The objectives of this report are to: (1) Develop detailed chemical kinetic reaction models for components of fuels, including olefins and cycloalkanes used in diesel, spark-ignition and HCCI engines; (2) Develop surrogate mixtures of hydrocarbon components to represent real fuels and lead to efficient reduced combustion models; and (3) Characterize the role of fuel composition on production of emissions from practical automotive engines.

Phenomenology of Diesel Combustion and Modeling Diesel is the most efficient combustion engine today and it plays an important role in transport of goods and passengers on land and on high seas. The emissions must be controlled as stipulated by the society without sacrificing the legendary fuel economy of the diesel engines. These important drivers caused innovations in diesel engineering like re-entrant combustion chambers in the piston, lower swirl support and high pressure injection, in turn reducing the ignition delay and hence the nitric oxides. The limits on emissions are being continually reduced. The- fore, the required accuracy of the models to predict the emissions and efficiency of the engines is high. The phenomenological combustion models based on physical and chemical description of the processes in the engine are practical to describe diesel engine combustion and to carry out parametric studies. This is because the injection process, which can be relatively well predicted, has the dominant effect on mixture formation and subsequent course of combustion. The need for improving these models by incorporating new developments in engine designs is explained in Chapter 2. With “model based control programs” used in the Electronic Control Units of the engines, phenomenological models are assuming more importance now because the detailed CFD based models are too slow to be handled by the Electronic Control Units. Experimental work is necessary to develop the basic understanding of the pr- esses.