Surrogate for Emulating Physicochemical and Kinetics Characteristics of RP-3 Aviation Fuel

The composition of a typical aviation kerosene fuel contains hundreds to thousands of hydrocarbon components. To perform numerical modeling of multiphase spray combustion, it is essential to use a surrogate fuel composed of a few chemical species that can accurately emulate real fuel’s physicochemical and kinetics properties. A previously developed methodology based on the inversed distillation approach was further extended to include matching experimental kinetics data for deciding composition of a unified surrogate fuel of the RP-3 aviation fuel. A skeletal kerosene chemical kinetic mechanism composed of 231 species and 5591 reactions was implemented for the purpose of targeting kinetics properties of the RP-3 fuel. Based on the hydrocarbon class concentrations of RP-3 fuels of aromatics, cyclo-alkanes, and normal/iso-alkanes, the proposed RP-3 surrogate, composed of toluene/trans-decalin/n-decane/iso-cetane (mole fraction: 0.150/0.189/0.591/0.070), was obtained. The accuracy of the current surrogate, n...