Technical Report 194, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge

Authors: Yong Ren Tan, Maria Botero, Yuan Sheng, Jochen Dreyer, Rong Xu, Wenming Yang, and Markus Kraft

Reference: Technical Report 194, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge, 2017

Associated Themes:
 

• The smoke points of diesel blends with PODE_n and several other oxygenated hydrocarbon additives were measured with a diffusion flame.
• Sooting propensity of all the oxygenated blends exhibited similar results.
• Oxygen content effect was found to have limited impact in comparison to dilution effect for soot suppression.

In this paper, we investigate the sooting propensity of PODE_n/diesel blends. The sooting characteristics of PODE_n/diesel blends are determined using a standard ASTM D1322 smoke point lamp. The performance of PODE_n with different chain length (addition of -CH₂O- units) is benchmarked against other oxygenated soot suppression additives, including esters (methyl butyrate), carbonates (dimethyl carbonate) and alcohols (n-butanol). Soot reduction induced by the dilution of the aromatic fraction in the diesel fuel was found to have the biggest impact, followed by soot reduction by decreasing the hydrocarbon chain length and to a lesser extent increasing the oxygen content. The reason for the limited influence of oxygen content on soot suppression was further explored by examining the possible decomposition pathways and products of the different additives.

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