A Study on Kinetic Mechanisms of Diesel Fuel Surrogate n-Dodecane for the Simulation of Combustion Recession

Combustion recession, an end of injection (EOI) diesel spray phenomenon, has been found to be a robust correlation parameter for UHC in diesel LTC strategies. Previous studies have shown that the likelihood of capturing combustion recession in numerical simulations is highly dependent on the details of the low-temperature chemistry reaction mechanisms employed. This study aims to further the understanding of the effects of different chemical mechanisms in the prediction of a reactive diesel spray and its EOI process: combustion recession. Studies were performed under the Engine Combustion Network’s (ECN) “Spray A” conditions using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulation (RANS) and the Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) combustion model with four different chemical mechanisms for n-dodecane that are commonly used in the engine simulation communities - including recently developed reduced chemistry mechanisms. The flamelet database for each of the chemical mechanism is generated using two methods: 0D homogeneous reactor (HR) ignition flamelets and 1D igniting counterflow diffusion (ICDF) flamelets. The effect of different tabulation approaches is investigated first following by the discussion of the impact of chemical mechanisms on the prediction of combustion recession. Further discussions include an evaluation of the performance of chemical mechanisms in predicting the most relevant reacting spray characteristics compared to the ECN experimental database: ignition delay time (IDT), flame lift-off length (LOL) and flame reactive region. Results show that the choice of both tabulation method and chemical mechanism play a significant role in initial flame stabilization and end of injection (EOI) transient processes. In general, both tabulation techniques were able to qualitatively capture the flame characteristics before EOI, however ICDF tabulation is better suited for the FGM approach in order to capture combustion recession. Furthermore, the chemical mechanisms studied indicate that mechanisms with stronger low temperature chemistry predictions are more likely to promote combustion recession under an FGM framework.