An experimental flow reactor study of the combustion kinetics of terpenoid jet fuel compounds: Farnesane, p-menthane and p-cymene

Abstract

The combustion kinetics of three bio jet fuel compounds farnesane, p-menthane and p-cymene, derived from natural terpenoids, have been investigated experimentally by an atmospheric high temperature flow reactor coupled with molecular beam mass spectrometric detection (MBMS). Quantitative speciation data for their oxidation chemistry in combustion is presented to provide an insight into the combustion behavior and provide detailed validation data for kinetic modeling. The experimental results are compared and discussed to analyze distinct combustion phenomena such as fuel consumption pathways and soot precursor chemistry. The fuel selection focuses on biotechnologically producible terpenoid components, namely the isoalkane 2,6,10-trimethyl dodecane (farnesane), the cycloalkane 1-isopropyl-4-methylcyclohexane (p-menthane) and the branched aromatic compound 1-isopropyl-4-methylbenzene (p-cymene). Literature data on farnesane (recently approved with up to 10% blending in Jet A-1) is limited and even scarcer for the two potential synthetic fuel additive species, p-menthane and p-cymene. The comprehensive, systematic experimental speciation data set including the single fuel components for lean to rich stoichiometries (0.5 to 1.5) is available in the supplemental material to this contribution.

Modeling of aromatics formation in fuel-rich methane oxy-combustion with an automatically generated pressure-dependent mechanism

“…67 Due to the change in temperature, Reynolds numbers vary from 113-161, which assures the plug flow approximation; also, the residence time of gas ranges from 1.2-1.8 s. 66 The experimental and numerical methods have been shown to give valid targets for development of kinetic mechanisms. [67][68][69][70] A brief summary of the experimental conditions may be found in Table 1; the original publication gives more details. 3 For the present study, the full dataset was reanalyzed with respect to soot precursors and aromatic species.…”

Experimental and mechanistic investigation of benzene formation during atmospheric pressure flow reactor oxidation of n-hexane, n-nonane, and n-dodecane below 1200 K

“…reactor. The experimental setup is previously described in high detail [59,60], so only a brief description is given here. The system consists of a flow reactor, including gas supplies and vaporizer system, which is coupled to a molecular beam mass spectrometry (MBMS) system.…”

Kinetics of Ethylene Glycol: The first validated reaction scheme and first measurements of ignition delay times and speciation data

“…Note that due to the high dilution temperature profiles are independent from the investigated fuel and the applied input temperature profiles can be found as electronic supplement of ref. [36]. The plug flow approximation is based on the measured residence time distribution of the system, which determines a Bodenstein number of Bo~100, often considered as a lower limit for plug flow assumption.…”