A Surrogate for Emulating Physicochemical and Kinetics Characteristics of RP-3 Aviation Fuel

The composition of a typical aviation kerosene fuel contains hundreds to thousands of hydrocarbon components. To perform numerical modeling of multiphase spray combustion, it is essential to use a surrogate fuel composed of a few chemical species that can accurately emulate real fuel's physicochemical and kinetics properties. A previously developed methodology based on the inversed distillation approach was further extended to include matching experimental kinetics data for deciding composition of a unified surrogate fuel of the RP-3 aviation fuel. A skeletal kerosene chemical kinetic mechanism composed of 231 species and 5591 reactions was implemented for the purpose of targeting kinetics properties of the RP-3 fuel. Based on the hydrocarbon class concentrations of RP-3 fuels of aromatics, cyclo-alkanes, and normal/iso-alkanes, the proposed RP-3 surrogate, composed of toluene/trans-decalin/n-decane/iso-cetane (mole fraction: 0.150/0.189/0.591/0.070), was obtained. The accuracy of the current surrogate, named JI-3, was assessed for predictions of the distillation curve, physicochemical properties including hydrogen-carbon ratio, molecular weight, lower heating value, density, specific heat, kinematic viscosity, thermal conductivity, surface tension, and latent heat, as well as combustion properties of ignition delay times and laminar flame speeds by comparisons with available experimental data.