Effect of Fuel Chemical Structure on Soot Formation in Sustainable Aviation Fuels

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) offer great promises towards decarbonizing the aviation sector. Due to the high safety standards and global scale of the aviation industry, SAFs pose challenges to aircraft engines and combustion processes, which must be thoroughly understood. Soot emissions from aircrafts play a crucial role, acting as ice nuclei and contributing to the formation of contrail cirrus clouds, which, in turn, may account for a substantial portion of the net radiative climate forcing. This study focuses on utilizing detailed kinetic simulations and soot modeling to investigate soot particle generation in aero-engines operating on SAFs. Differences in soot yield were investigated for different fuel components, including n-alkanes, iso-alkanes, cycloalkanes, and aromatics. A 0-D simulation framework was developed and utilized in conjunction with advanced soot models to predict and assess soot processes under conditions relevant to aero-engine combustion. The simulations, conducted under combustion and inert conditions, revealed that aromatic fuels significantly enhance soot yield, exhibiting accelerated growth toward larger aromatics under both combustion and pyrolysis conditions. The results also highlight the necessity for higher gas temperatures for PAHs to grow, in agreement with pyrolysis experiments indicating soot onset temperatures between 1400 and 1500K. Furthermore, the study assessed the influence of precursors on soot formation, challenging the appropriateness of using C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>2</sub> or mono-aromatics as precursors with the tested soot models. The simulation results indicate that such precursors lead to large errors, advocating for the use of larger PAHs as precursor in these soot models, as suggested by the models’ validation space. Finally, this work also explores the impact of fuel structure on soot formation, contributing to ongoing efforts to replace aromatics with cycloalkanes in jet fuels through examining reference fuel blends representative of petroleum-based jet fuel and cycloalkane-based SAFs. The “SAF” blends result in a reduced soot yield compared to the jet fuel surrogate, underscoring SAFs’ capability to diminish emissions in the aviation industry.</div></div>