Kinetics of Oxidation of a 100% Gas-to-Liquid Synthetic Jet Fuel and a Mixture GtL/1-Hexanol in a Jet-Stirred Reactor: Experimental and Modeling Study

Research activities on the combustion of synthetic jet fuels and bioderived jet fuels have increased notably over the last 10 yr in order to solve the challenging reduction of dependence of air transportation on petroleum. Within the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, the combustion of a 100% GtL from Shell and a 80/20% vol. GtL/1-hexanol blend were studied in a jet-stirred reactor (JSR). This synthetic GtL fuel mainly contains n-alkanes, iso-alkanes, and cyclo-alkanes. We studied the oxidation of these alternative jet fuels under the same conditions (temperature, 550-1150 K; pressure, 10 bar; equivalence ratio, 0.5-2; initial fuel concentration, 1000 ppm). For simulating the oxidation kinetics of these fuels we used a new surrogate mixture consisting of n-dodecane, 3-methylheptane, n-propylcyclohexane, and 1-hexanol. A detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanism was developed and validated by comparison with the experimental results obtained in a JSR. The current model was also tested for the auto-ignition of the GtL fuel under shock tubes conditions (phi = 1 and P = 20 atm) using data from the literature. Kinetic computations involving reaction paths analyses and sensitivity analyses were used to interpret the results. The general findings are that the GtL and GtL/hexanol blend have very similar reactivity to Jet A-1, which is important since GtL is a drop-in fuel that should have similar performance to the Jet A-1 baseline and 1-hexanol should not significantly affect the reactivity if it is to be used as an additive.