Development of a reduced primary reference fuel – oxymethylene dimethyl ether (PRF-OME_x) mechanism for diesel engine applications

Abstract

Oxymethylene dimethyl ethers (OMEx), having a chemical formula of CH3O-(CH2O)x-CH3 where x varies from 1 to 5, have been widely considered as a promising fuel to partially replace diesel in CI engines in terms of reducing soot emissions. This work is focused on developing a reduced primary reference fuel (PRF)-OMEx chemical mechanism to better describe the combustion and emission characteristics of gasoline/diesel blends with OMEx. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that the OMEx part of the mechanism is represented not only by OME3 as done in most studies found in literature, but also with other OME chain lengths that is, OME2-4 which are considered to be optimum and better represent the commercial OMEx blends. For this purpose, a detailed OMEx mechanism is reduced by applying different reduction techniques considering a wide range of operating conditions including pressure, temperatures, equivalence ratios and fuel compositions. The result is merged with an already validated PRF mechanism to form a reduced PRF-OMEx mechanism consisting of 213 species and 840 reactions. The newly formed mechanism is validated against a wide set of experimental data including ignition delay times, laminar flame speeds and species concentration profiles. Furthermore, a rigorous set of numerical simulations for various diesel-OMEx blends in a compression ignition engine are carried out at two different operating points to validate the developed mechanism. Simulation results highlight that the developed mechanism not only replicates the experimental behavior in terms of in-cylinder pressure and heat release rate but exhibits a better combustion phasing closer to experimental data when compared with other mechanisms where only OME3 is utilized to represent OMEx. Overall, the developed PRF-OMEx mechanism proves to be realistic and suitable for application in engine combustion simulations involving gasoline/diesel and OMEx blends.