High fidelity engine simulation requires realistic fuel models. Although typical automotive fuels consist of more than few hundreds of hydrocarbon species, researches show that the physical and chemical properties of the real fuels could be represented by appropriate surrogate fuel models. It is desirable to represent the fuel using the same set of physical and chemical surrogate components. However, when the reaction mechanisms for a certain physical surrogate component is not available, the chemistry of the unmatched physical component is described using that of a similar chemical surrogate component at the expense of accuracy.
In order to reduce the prediction error while maintaining the computational efficiency, a method of on-the-fly reactivity adjustment (ReAd) of chemical reaction mechanism along with fuel re-distribution based on reactivity is presented and tested in this study.
The method is applied to simulate engine combustion with multi-component fuel sprays and its performance is compared to that of simulations with a reaction mechanism that considers the full set of physical/chemical surrogate components. The results show that the ReAd method improves the accuracy of combustion prediction using a single chemistry surrogate, while maintaining superb computational efficiency.