Standardization of dimethyl ether (DME) fuel specifications

Abstract

Legislation and standardization are necessary and important for fuel quality control to ensure safety, security, and stability with regard to the commercialization and trading of new fuels. The author began R&D of dimethyl ether (DME) fuel utilization technology in 2001. This work involved basic research on fuel spray and combustion, applied research on the development of test vehicles, and field tests of these applications. In addition, work on standardizing DME fuel specifications commenced in 2007. In 2015, five ISO standards were published. In this paper, the standardization of DME fuel is presented, which includes a way to define limits on impurities, and the results of round-robin-tests for deterioration by impurities from the users’ viewpoint.