Combustion of methylcyclohexane at elevated temperatures to investigate burning velocity for surrogate fuel...

To overcome the complexity associated with the development of detailed kinetic models for real transportation fuels, surrogate fuel models offer an excellent alternative. The present study reports laminar burning velocity (LBV) measurements of methylcyclohexane (MCH) + air mixtures for mixture temperatures up to 610 K using externally heated diverging channel method (EHDC) method at 1 atm pressure. MCH is a commonly used surrogate blend for aviation fuels, gasoline, and diesel, whose kinetic model is simpler to develop. The measurement of laminar burning velocity forms the basis of kinetic model development for such surrogate fuels. The present work reports the measured LBV values for an equivalence ratio range, φ = 0.7-1.4, and their comparison with available experimental data and detailed kinetic model predictions for a mixture temperature range, 353-610 K. Temperature exponent, α is derived using the power-law correlation and good consistency with kinetic model predictions is observed up to 500 K mixture temperatures. At 610 K mixture temperature, an overprediction of ≈12% at φ = 1.05 is observed with JeTSurF 2.0 (2010) model and 27% overprediction with the kinetic model of PoliMi (2014) φ = 1.1. Overall, the reported LBV measurements show slightly better match with the JeTSurF 2.0 (2010) kinetic model than the Wang (2014) kinetic model. Reaction pathway diagrams are drawn to highlight the importance of C₂H₄ and C₂H₃ radicals for an increase in the overall reaction rate at 610 K.