In recent years, there has been rapid progress in characterizing the detailed chemical kinetics associated with the oxidation of liquid hydrocarbons and their blends. However adding these fuel models to the industrial engineer's toolkit has proven a major challenge due to issues associated with high CPU cost and the poor suitability of many of the most promising and well known fuel models to IC engine applications.
This paper demonstrates the state-of-the-art in the analysis and modelling of current and future transportation fuels or fuel blends for internal combustion engine applications. First-of-all, a benchmarking of eleven representative fuel models (39 to 1034 species in size) is carried out at engine/engine-like operating conditions by adopting the standard Research Octane and Cetane Number test data for comparison.
Next, methods to construct a fuel model for a commercial fuel are outlined using a simple, yet robust surrogate mapping technique. Finally, this method is used together with an extensively validated IC engine simulator (based on PDF-based methods - characterizing all key engine sub-processes fuel injection, turbulence, heat transfer etc.), to analyze the performance of multiple fuels and fuel blends (six commercial gasoline and diesel fuels and two standard bio-diesel/diesel blends) in two CIDI engines.