Publications Details

Rapid Assessment of Autoignition Propensity in Novel Fuels and Blends

Sheps, Leonid S.; Buras, Zachary B.; Zador, Judit Z.; Au, Kendrew; Safta, Cosmin S.

We developed a computational strategy to correlate bulk combustion metrics of novel fuels and blends in the low-temperature autoignition regime with measurements of key combustion intermediates in a small-volume, dilute, high-pressure reactor. We used neural net analysis of a large simulation dataset to obtain an approximate correlation and proposed experimental and computational steps needed to refine such a predictive correlation. We also designed and constructed a high-pressure laboratory apparatus to conduct the proposed measurements and demonstrated its performance on three canonical fuels: n-heptane, i-octane, and dimethyl ether.