Development of a Semi-Detailed Kinetics Mechanism for the Autoignition of Iso-Octane

A reduced autoignition mechanism for iso-octane has been developed by identifying paths to formation of the stable species measured during motoring knock experiments and eliminating paths to formation of species that were not measured. The resulting mechanism includes low-, intermediate-, and high-temperature reactions and consists of 103 species and 131 reactions. This mechanism differs from detailed models not only in the number of reactions and species, but most importantly, in the nature and rates of the degenerate chain branching reactions. To implement this mechanism, a knock subroutine has been added to a quasidimensional spark ignition engine model that accounts for heat losses, blowby, etc. Thus, errors in the reactivity predictions can be assigned almost exclusively to the kinetics. Numerical predictions of the exhaust composition during motoring knock are compared with experimental measurements as a function of compression ratio for several operating conditions. For the range of engine operating conditions examined, the present autoignition model predicts the major features of autoignition quite well.