A new approach to formulation of complex fuel surrogates

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to the formulation of fuel surrogates in application to gasoline, diesel, and their biofuel blends (including blends of biodiesel/diesel and ethanol/gasoline). This new approach, described as a ‘Complex Fuel Surrogates Model (CFSM)’, is based on a modified version of the Multi-Dimensional Quasi-Discrete Model (MDQDM). The new approach is aimed to reduce the full composition of fuel to a much smaller number of components based on their mass fractions to formulate fuel surrogates. The formulated surrogates for gasoline and blended ethanol/gasoline fuels matched the data of the full compositions of the same fuels for droplet lifetime, surface temperature, density, vapour pressure, H/C ratio, molar weight and research octane number, using the CFSM. Also, the cetane number and viscosity of diesel and biodiesel/diesel blends were mimicked by their suggested surrogates. The results were verified, with up to 7.2% errors between the two sets of predicted droplet lifetimes: surrogates and full compositions of fuels.