An experimental and kinetic modeling study on the ignition property of an alternative gas to liquid jet fuel

Alternative jet fuel from Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis represents an important kind of aviation fuel in the near future. However, the combustion properties of FT jet fuel have not been fully explored yet. Herein, this work reports an experimental and kinetic modeling study on the ignition characteristics of a coal-derived FT jet fuel. To facilitate its usage as a “drop-in” fuel in current aircraft and infrastructure, a blended fuel of the present FT fuel with a traditional RP-3 jet fuel with relatively high aromatic hydrocarbons is also prepared and studied. Specifically, a shock tube facility is employed to measure the ignition delay times (IDTs) of the FT, RP-3, and the blended jet fuels under the combustion conditions, i.e., temperature ranging from 1000–1800 K, pressure at 3 and 10 bar, equivalence ratio at 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0. Two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC × GC) analysis is adopted to determine the chemical compositions of the FT and RP-3 jet fuels, which is then used to aid the development of surrogate models. Most importantly, the contemporary combustion chemical kinetic mechanism via detailed generation, automatic generation, lumping, decoupling and HyChem methods are employed to model the IDTs, and the mechanism reproducibility of these mechanisms are systematically compared. The present work should be valuable to understand the chemical structure effect on alternative jet fuels and also provides important information for the development of different kinds of combustion kinetic mechanisms.