Gladys Moréac

AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF A DETAILED MECHANISM FOR THE OXIDATION OF n-DECANE

A single detailed kinetic mechanism for the oxidation and combustion of n-decane and n-heptane has been written by means of an automatic mechanism generator (REACTION) developed in our laboratory. It shows a good prediction of the ignition delay time versus temperature for the oxidation of n-decane at 13 and 50 bar and n-heptane at 13 and 40 bar for different equivalence ratios. The n-decane/n-heptane mechanism consists of a validated and recently published O2/H2/C1-C4 mechanism produced manually and a generated C5–C10 set of sub-mechanisms. The mechanism includes a complete description of both n-decane and n-heptane chemistry. This mechanism has a reasonable size, 506 species and 3684 reactions, but nevertheless it has an extensive range of chemistry. This paper represents not only the validation of a specific mechanism but also a validation of the rate constants of the reaction classes used to model the oxidation of alkanes at low and high temperature.

Modeling the Laminar Flame Speed of Natural Gas and Gasoline Surrogates

An unified model with a single set of kinetic parameters has been proposed for modeling laminar flame velocities of several alkanes using detailed kinetic mechanisms automatically generated by the EXGAS software. The validations were based on recent data of the literature. The studied compounds are methane, ethane, propane, n-butane, n-pentane, n-heptane, iso-octane, and two mixtures for natural gas and surrogate gasoline fuel. Investigated conditions are the following: unburned gases temperature was varied from 300 to 600 K, pressures from 0.5 to 25 bar, and equivalence ratios range from 0.4 to 2. For the overall studied compounds, the agreement between measured and predicted laminar burning velocities is quite good.