Demonstrating a Direct-Injection Constant-Volume Combustion Chamber As a Validation Tool for Chemical Kinetic Modeling of Liquid Fuels

Supporting chemical kinetics model development with robust experimental results is the job of shock-tube, rapid compression machine, and other apparatus operators. A key limitation of many of these systems is difficulty with preparation of a fuel vapor-air mixture for heavy liquid fuels. Previous work has suggested that the Cetane Ignition Delay (CID) 510 system is capable of providing data useful for kinetics validation. Specifically, this constant-volume combustion chamber (1) can be characterized by a single bulk temperature, and (2) uses a high-pressure diesel injector to generate rapid fuel-air mixing and thus create a homogeneous mixture well before ignition. In this study, initial experiments found relatively good agreement between experiments and kinetic models for n-heptane and poor agreement for iso-octane under nominally the same ignition delay ranges for ambient conditions under which the mixture is determined to be effectively homogeneous. After excluding potential non-kinetic fuel properties as causes, further experiments highlight the high pressure sensitivity of the negative temperature coefficient (NTC) behavior. While this challenge is well known to kinetic mechanism developers, the data set included in this work (n-heptane at 5 bar and iso-octane at 5–20 bar, each for various equivalence ratios) can be added to those used for validation. The results and system characterization presented demonstrate that this combustion system is capable of capturing kinetic effects decoupled from the spray process for these primary reference fuels. Future work can leverage this capability to provide kinetics validation data for most heavy, exotic, or otherwise difficult to test liquid fuels.